Germany’s Rappbode reservoir, the largest drinking reservoir in Germany is at risk of warming up due to climate change which could present new water management challenges, an article in the Science Daily says.
Global temperature increase between 4 to 6 degrees by 2100 will also increase water temperature, creating new challenges to reservoir water management.
A group of researchers that Dr. Karsten Rinke leads looks at the possible implications and challenges this reservoir’s rising temperature brings. They observed that in the summer the reservoir’s water surface has already increased by about 4 degrees and has demonstrated that this trend will continue in the coming years.
The researchers based their projections on the three representative concentration pathways (RCPs): RCP 2.6, RCP 6, and RCP 8.5.
These RCPs shows various trajectories of GHG concentrations in the atmosphere adopted by the IPCC to describe and model different climate futures depending on whether emissions are abated or will continue to increase in the coming years and decades.
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