Water and Global Change (WATCH): bringing research communities together to study the global water cycle

WATCH (WATer and global CHange) is a four-year Integrated Project funded under the European Union Sixth Framework Programme, which aims to bring together the hydrological, water resources and climate research communities to analyse, quantify and predict the components of the current and future global water cycles.

The Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UK) is the main coordinating institute for WATCH, heading a consortium of 25 leading research centres in climate change and hydrological science throughout Europe.  The scale of the challenges WATCH will face requires the mobilisation of a large, multidisciplinary team of Europe’s foremost researchers, combined with the research infrastructure of Europe’s leading research institutions.

WATCH will provide the first platform to consolidate global water cycle and resource modeling frameworks – based on state-of-the-art analysis and projections of climate models – for both global and regional scales.

Latest information

A WATCH website (external website) has been created where you can find further information on the project. The WATCH coordinating team are based at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology Headquarters site in Wallingford, UK.

For general enquiries about WATCH, please e-mail: info-watch@ceh.ac.uk

Why is WATCH needed? Understanding the global water cycle

The global water cycle is an integral part of the Earth System. It plays a central role in global atmospheric circulations, controlling the global energy cycle (through latent heat) as well as the carbon, nutrient and sediment cycles.  Globally, the supply of fresh water far exceeds human requirements. However, by the end of the 21st century, these requirements begin to approach the total available water. Of course, regionally, the water demand – for agriculture, and domestic and industrial use – already exceeds supply.

Increasing CO2 levels and temperature are intensifying the global hydrological cycle, with an overall net increase of rainfall, runoff and evapo-transpiration, and will do so increasingly.  The predictions of future regional rainfall are fairly uncertain.  There are indications, however, that the Mediterranean region will see reductions of rainfall and some equatorial regions, such as India and the Sahel, will see increases. The seasonality may also change, causing new, and sometimes unexpected, vulnerabilities. The intensification of the hydrological cycle is likely to mean an increase in extremes – floods and droughts. There are suggestions that inter-annual variability will increase – with an intensification of the El Ninõ and NAO cycles – leading to more droughts and large-scale flooding events. These cycles are global phenomena which will impact different regions simultaneously (although often in different ways).