Exploring the ability of current climate information to facilitate local climate services for the water sector

Abstract

Local climate services become increasingly necessary in making adaptation to our changing climate more understandable and manageable. The ability of current climate information to develop and support local climate services for water resources management in close collaboration with local users of the water sector from the island of Crete is being explored. Climate modeling output ranging from event scale to decadal and centennial experiments, at hourly to monthly temporal scales and at high resolution (2 Km) to GCM spatial scales (100–250 km), are used to assess climate change impacts on water resources availability and extremes. A robust signal of temperature increase and precipitation decrease is projected for all future periods, in parallel to an increase in magnitude of extreme precipitation. Several messages could be extracted from the provider – user interaction such as the communication of basic concepts and uncertainties, user skepticism and feedback. The frequent personal contact, the communication in layman’s terms of the limitations of the climate impact modeling and the corresponding uncertainties, is the key to successful provisions of suitable information.