Predictions of river temperature and sensitivity to climate change in Scotland

These layers are the outputs of research which developed a national river temperature model for Scotland capable of predicting both daily maximum river temperature and sensitivity to climate change. The layers show the following:

summer_max_tw_2015_16 – Predictions of maximum daily river temperatures for the hottest day between July 2015 and June 2016.

summer_max_tw_2003 – Predictions of maximum daily river temperatures for the hottest year in the last 20 years (2003).

summer_climate_change_sensitivity – Predictions of the change in river temperature that would result from a 1°C increase in air temperature.

A fourth layer has been developed to combine the outputs from “summer_max_tw_2003” and “summer_climate_change_sensitivity” into a single layer that can be used to prioritise management where the relative importance of maximum temperature and temperature change are considered to be equal. This was achieved by (1) dividing the predictions of ‘summer_max_tw_2003’ and ‘summer_climate_change_sensitivity’ into 5 equal categories between the minimum and maximum observed values (2) assigning these categories a value ranging from 1 (the hottest / most sensitive rivers) to 5 (the coolest / least sensitive rivers) (3) sum the rankings (-1) to produce an overall priority ranking (1:9) where rivers ranked as 1 are the highest priority for management (i.e. high river temperature and high climate sensitivity) and 9 the lowest.

Management_Priority_Layer – Management priority on a scale of 1:9 where 1 is the highest priority (i.e. high river temperature and high climate sensitivity) and 9 the lowest.

• Please Note * This layer was derived by the Scottish Government from a licensed dataset. It is not downloadable or routinely available.

The data can be shared on request if a user provides evidence that they hold a licence from the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH) for the 1:50,000 Digital River Network (https://www.ceh.ac.uk/data/15000-watercourse-network)