Climate change, land use and runoff theme - first posting

Hello from the "Climate change, land use and runoff theme". Jointly with Bob Evans, I'm leading the theme under IWAM. We hope to post more soon, but for now here are some thoughts on how some of my current work relates to the theme. Last year, I published a paper with Richard Betts looking at global river flows under climate change. This found changes in total annual flows for most of the globe - increases in high latitudes and decreases in areas like Southern Europe and the Mediterranean.



Changes in seasonality were also found - such as earlier runoff peaks in spring in Siberia due to earlier snow melt. Now Met Office Hadley Centre climate models are being extended to include large scale crop models, and soil carbon and nitrogen models as well as river flows, my questions for the theme are:

• How will changes in rainfall and river flow affect soil erosion?
• How will climate change affect nutrient losses in agricultural systems?
• How will these changes interact with future land use changes?
• What is the impact of these changes on the agricultural system (productivity, management, irrigation..)?

The paper on river flows can be found here:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/112791019/ABSTRACT?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0