| Abstract |
The Okavango River Basin with the world’s largest inland delta is a hotspot of future climate change. The river originates in the rainy Bié Plateau in Angola, touches the north-western part of Namibia with its savanna woodlands and terminates in a delta situated in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana. The annual hydrological cycle of the area shows two extremes: Seasonal flooding alternates with dry periods affecting water levels of the Okavango River in downstream regions. As the region is strongly characterized by and depends on the water resource of the Okavango River, possible changes of the climate, affecting all components of the hydrological cycle and thus the lives of the people living in a region of such unique natural characteristics are of uppermost importance and interest. The interdisciplinary research project “The Future Okavango” (TFO) aims at an improvement of knowledge based land use management within the Okavango River Basin. In the TFO project the new representative concentrations pathways (RCPs) are considered which contain a possible low (RCP4.5) and a high (RCP8.5) anthropogenic emission scenario until the end of the 21st century. The regional climate change projections were dynamically downscaled with the regional climate model REMO using data from two different global circulation models (ECHAM6 and EC-EARTH) as input. To obtain the high spatial resolution of 25 x 25 km of the regional climate change projections, which can solve the special topography in the Okavango River Basin, a double nesting method was applied. This work shows model results of possible future developments of temperature and precipitation as well as some precipitations indices over the Okavango River Basin under different global model forcings and emission scenarios. |
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