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Motivations of the HyMex Programme
The Mediterranean basin has quite a unique character that results both from physiographic conditions and historical and societal developments. The region features a nearly enclosed sea surrounded by very urbanized littorals and mountains from which numerous rivers originate. This results in many interactions and feedback between ocean-atmosphere-land processes that play a prominent role in climate and ecosystems, and make he Mediterranean area a unique highly coupled system. Research should now not only focus on processes within each Earth compartment, but also on interface processes and feedback loops in order to make significant progress in the comprehension and prediction of the Mediterranean water cycle and related phenomena.
High impact weather events
The Mediterranean area concentrates the major natural risks related to the water cycle, including heavy precipitation and flash-flooding during the fall season, severe cyclogenesis associated with strong winds and large sea waves during winter, and heat waves and droughts accompanied by forest fires during summer. The capability to predict such high-impact events remains weak because of the contribution of very fine-scale processes and their non-linear interactions with the larger scale processes. Advances in the identification of the predominant processes and particularly of their interactions at the different scales are needed in order to better forecast these events and reduce uncertainties on the prediction of their evolution (e.g. frequency, intensity) in the future climate. These issues are not only of primary importance for providing a tangible basis for early warning procedures and mitigation measures designed to avoid loss of life and reduce damage, but also to assess their impacts on the terrestrial and marine ecosystems, some of which may be irreversible.
Water resource issues
Freshwater is rare and unevenly distributed in time and space with few short duration heavy precipitation and long drought periods. In numerous countries, almost all the rivers are either intermittent or ephemeral. Water resource is a critical issue in a large part of the Mediterranean basin: with less than 1000 m3 per person per year, 180 million people face water scarcity, which represents more than one half of the world's so-called water poor population. Increasing water demand and climate change add to this background. During the second half of the 20th century, water demand has increased twofold. Progress has to be made in the monitoring and modelling of the Mediterranean hydrological continental cycle in order to better predict its future evolution and impacts on water resources for appropriate management.
A hot-spot for the climate change
Mediterranean regions have been identified as one of the two main hot-spots of climate change, meaning that climate is especially responsive to global change in this area. Large decrease in mean precipitation and increase in precipitation variability during dry (warm) season are expected as well as large increase in temperature (+1.4 to +5.8'C in 2100). Large uncertainties however remain on the future evolution of climate in the Mediterranean. Progress has to be made in the monitoring and modelling of the Mediterranean coupled climate system (atmosphere-land-ocean) in order to quantify the on-going changes and to better predict their future evolution as guidelines for the development of adaptation measures.
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