Future Riverine Inorganic Nitrogen Load to the Baltic Sea From Sweden : An Ensemble Approach to Assessing Climate Change Effects

The dramatic increase of bioreactive nitrogen entering the Earth’s ecosystems continues toattract growing attention. Increasingly large quantities of inorganic nitrogen are flushed from land towater, accelerating freshwater, and marine eutrophication. Multiple, interacting, and potentiallycountervailing drivers control the future hydrologic export of inorganic nitrogen. In this paper, we attempt toresolve these land-water interactions across boreal/hemiboreal Sweden in the face of a changing climatewith help of a versatile modeling framework to maximize the information value of existing measurementtime series. We combined 6,962 spatially distributed water chemistry observations spread over 31 years withdaily streamflow and air temperature records. An ensemble of climate model projections, hydrologicalsimulations, and several parameter parsimonious regression models was employed to project future riverineinorganic nitrogen dynamics across Sweden. The median predicted increase in total inorganic nitrogenexport from Sweden (2061–2090) due to climate change was 14% (interquartile range 0–29%), based on theensemble of 7,500 different predictions for each study site. The overall export as well as the seasonal patternof inorganic nitrogen loads in a future climate are mostly influenced by longer growing seasons and morewinter flow, which offset the expected decline in spring flood. The predicted increase in inorganic nitrogenloading due to climate change means that the political efforts for reducing anthropogenic nitrogen inputsneed to be increased if ambitions for reducing the eutrophication of the Baltic Sea are to be achieved.