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Changing Water Cycle Programme Consultation Exercise

Living with Environmental Change logoKey science challenges and opportunities for the Changing water cycle programme

NERC is undertaking a consultation exercise for the implementation stage of the Changing Water Cycle Programme. The community is invited to contribute via individual or coordinated group responses by submitting a response to the five questions posed below. The response must be a maximum of 2 sides of A4.

These inputs will be made available to the Programme Advisory Group who will meet at the end of March to start the development of the science plan.

Responses should be submitted by completing the pro-forma below and emailed to Sally Reid by 16:00 on Thursday 19 March 2009.

Guidance Information

The Changing Water Cycle is a major new research programme being developed as part of the Living With Environmental Change partnership. The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) has committed to invest £10m in the Changing Water Cycle Programme. The programme has been defined within three of NERC's theme action plans: Climate System, Sustainable Use of Natural Resources and Natural Hazards.

The programme will have the following high level science goals, which will be addressed across all three themes:

  1. To develop an integrated, quantitative understanding of the changes taking place in the global water cycle, involving all components of the earth system - the atmosphere, ocean, land surface and geosphere, cryosphere and biosphere.
  2. To improve predictions for the next few decades of regional precipitation, evapotranspiration, soil moisture, hydrological storage and fluxes, focusing on the requirement to quantify and narrow the uncertainty in predictions.
  3. To understand how local to regional scale hydrological and biogeochemical processes are responding and will respond to changing climate and land use, together with their consequent impacts on the sustainable use of soil and water.
  4. To understand the consequences of the changing water cycle for water-related natural hazards, including floods and droughts, and to improve prediction and mitigation of these hazards.

Changing Water Cycle Programme specification (57KB)

Pro-forma for consultation responses (41KB)

Contact details

Further information is available from:

Dr Sally Reid
Tel: 01793 442565

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