Assessing climate impacts on inland and coastal water quality

Questions surrounding water sustainability, climate change, and extreme events are often framed around water quantity - whether too much or too little. The economic and ecological impacts of water quality impairments are equally compelling, however, and recent years have provided numerous examples of unprecedented harmful algal blooms and hypoxic dead zones. Linkages between climate change and water quality impacts are often poorly understood, however, due to the complexity of underlying processes, the difference in the spatial and temporal scales traditionally examined by limnologists, ecologists, and climate scientists, and the paucity of long-term observations to support attribution studies. This talk will draw on several recent studies that quantitatively link meteorological variability and eutrophication impacts to explore opportunities for characterizing water quality, for bridging from local to global scales, for identifying key drivers, and for understanding the role of climate.

Speaker: Anna Michalak, Carnegie Institution for Science