BayCEER Workshop 2019

Prognosis and analysis of dissolved organic carbon export in the context of local climate change

P 3.13 in Open Poster Session

Recently, concentrations of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) have been increasing in the northern hemisphere. This can be understood as a system response to changing hydrological/climatic boundary conditions. The DOC concentration in a stream is closely linked to its discharge, because DOC is mobilized during storm events and after longer periods of drought. Due to climate change, these phenomena will occur more often. In addition, DOC production in soil water is linked to soil temperature, which will also continuously increase in times of climate change. In this project, we want to investigate how climate change influences DOC export rates in the Lehstenbach catchment, located in the Fichtelgebirge in Germany. There are several global climate models used to simulate changes in global climate patterns. Each of them provides their own boundary conditions and assumptions for subsequent regional climate models. To adress these different climate scenarios, we use a multi-model ensemble as input for a process-based hydrological model with the aim to assess DOC export in the chosen catchment.

Keywords: dissolved organic carbon, climate change, hydrology, process-based model