Total phosphorus transport and river runoff over Europe

Project: coastDat - Regional Water and Matter Fluxes at the Land-Ocean Interface - In order to better understand the global coastal systems and the dangers and risks associated with them, it is important to examine the atmosphere, the land, hydrology, the ocean and especially their interactions and feedbacks. In this project, we provide data on water and matter transport at the land surface. Currently, contributions were made by Umweltforschungszentrum Leipzig (UFZ) and the “Regional Land and Atmosphere Modeling” department of the Institute of Coastal Systems - Analysis and Modeling at Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon as well as from NIOZ and IOW. Our aim is to quantify the associated cycles of water and matter and their changes, mainly for the transition from land to the ocean. Our work contributes to GCOAST (Geesthacht Coupled cOAstal model SysTem) --> https://www.hereon.de/institutes/coastal_systems_analysis_modeling/research/gcoast/index.php.en
Summary: A set of five simulations for river runoff and total phosphorus transport within the European riverine system, driven by human activity and climate change. These simulations were carried out with the Hydrological Discharge model (Hagemann et al. 2020).

The hindcast simulation utilizes hydrological forcings from HydroPy model (Stake and Hagemann, 2021) driven with the Global Soil Wetness Project Phase 3 (GWSP3; Dirmeyer et al. 2006; Kim 2017) atmospheric dataset, and phosphorus concentrations from the IMAGE-GNM model (Beusen et al. 2015).

The historical simulation, along with three future scenarios, utilize hydrological forcings derived from the global Earth system model GFDL-ESM4 (John et al.2018), and phosphorus concentrations base on a newly developed parameterization. This parametrization incorporates land-use types and fertilizer application data in the form of nitrogen amounts from the Land-Use Harmonization 2 (LUH2; Hurtt et al. 2020).

To account for the effects of human activity and climate change, the simulations employ three integrated scenarios that combine the Shared Socioeconomical Pathways (SSP) narratives and the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP), specifically SSP1-RCP2.6, SSP3-RCP7.0 and SSP5-RCP8.5.

This research was funded by the Cluster of Excellence "Climate, Climatic Change, and Society" (CLICCS), project No 390683824, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy - EXC 2037. Computational resources were made available by the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) through support from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). We gratefully acknowledge the University of Hamburg for providing the data used in this study as part of the GLOWACHEM project, a component in the CLICCS framework.