New scientific associate in the CO-MICC project team

New scientific associate in the CO-MICC project team

In October, Denise Cáceres joined ICWRGC as a member of the CO-MICC project  team. CO-MICC (2018-2021), a scientific project led by the Goethe University of Frankfurt, aims to provide quantitative information on freshwater-related hazards of climate change, based on multiple hydrological models and climate scenarios, for risk and adaptation assessments at various spatial scales. This information will be provided in the form of an open-access web portal that can easily be accessed and understood by different types of end-users. The web portal will consist of a data portal, giving access to the multi-model-based data, and a knowledge portal containing meta information and methods co-developed together with stakeholders (end-users) on how to best utilize these data.

Denise is responsible for the dissemination of the project activities and results. Her main task is to develop the knowledge portal. Additionally, she supports the development of the data portal and facilitates the exchange between the project modelling team (knowledge providers) and the stakeholders (knowledge end-users) from the Ebro basin in Spain, one of the focus regions of the project.

Aside from her involvement in CO-MICC, Denise is currently a PhD candidate affiliated to the Goethe University of Frankfurt. As part of her PhD project, she has recently published a scientific article entitled “Assessing global water mass transfers from continents to oceans over the period 1948-2016” in the Hydrology and Earth System Sciences peer-reviewed journal (https://hess.copernicus.org/articles/24/4831/2020/). This publication stemmed from her collaboration with scientists from various disciplines (hydrology, glaciology and geodesy) in the framework of the Sea Level Budget Closure project from the ESA Climate Change Initiative.

The article deals with the question of how and to which extent changes in water storage on continents had an effect on the global ocean mass over the period 1948–2016. The results show that continents lost water to oceans at an accelerated rate, inducing sea level rise. Shrinking glaciers explain 81% of the long-term continental water mass loss, while declining groundwater levels, mainly due to sustained groundwater pumping for irrigation, is the second major driver. This long-term decline was partly offset by the impoundment of water in dams.