Prof Richard Betts, Project Director of HELIX FP7 is presenting the key findings in a full room at the University of Exeter.

We picked some of the major global river basins illustrating some of the uncertainty in river flows at different global warming according to higher end scenarios. We are using a set of high resolution global climate models driving a land surface model and we examine changes in river flow for a 1.5^oC, 2^oC and 4^oC warmer world. For lot of the river basins the uncertainty spans zero. It is hard to distinguish wetter or drier consensus. This is a really important message for decision maker “you can’t just hang your hat on one particular outcome, you may also consider opposite than more likely”.

That’s why we are working to reduce the range of uncertainty on potential hydrological impacts at the global scale. Some of the findings are included in the recently published paper in a Special Issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.