Anyone who looks at the Bavaria map of the low water information service these days will come across an alarming finding: As of Sunday, 259 of the 484 groundwater measuring points were yellow, orange or bright red. That means: the groundwater levels there are “low”, “very low” or have reached “a new low”. 259 of 484 measuring points are 54 percent. “Such a rate is absolutely worrying,” says Professor Martin Grambow. “In terms of water technology, we are starting the new year under the most tense conditions.” Grambow is a civil engineer and head of the water management department at the Ministry of the Environment. He is one of the leading water experts in this country.
Heavy snow showers did not fall over the foothills of the Alps again until the weekend. Nevertheless, this year’s winter is one of the many winters in Bavaria with too little precipitation. The reason for this was a series of stable high pressure areas, which are becoming increasingly common as a result of global warming. They shielded Bavaria from precipitation, so to speak.
“With precipitation amounts of 80 to 120 percent of the long-term average, the target has roughly been reached, as only in north-eastern Bavaria,” says Lothar Bock from the German Weather Service (DWD) in Munich. “In the Alps it was just 60 to 80 percent and therefore significantly less.” It was the driest – once again, one might say – in Middle Franconia. “Here we measured only 50 to 60 percent of the rainfall that is usual in the quarter.”
The streams, rivers and lakes are currently the least affected by the dry winter. There should hardly be any that carry a lot of water. That’s not the case most of the time in winter anyway. But at least 140 of 177 gauges on them are in the green range. That’s 83 percent. 27 or 16 percent are low, and one is very low. The soil is also saturated. “Everywhere in Bavaria we have a soil moisture content of between 90 and 110 percent,” says the DWD man Bock. “That will last for the next few weeks until sowing. And then the farmers and foresters will have to see how the year develops.”
The concern about the groundwater remains. Because it is not the first dry winter in which far too little new groundwater is formed. Since 2003, as they documented at the State Office for the Environment (LfU), groundwater recharge has turned negative. The annual deficit is about one sixth. The groundwater in Bavaria is now missing more than three years of regeneration. “In order to stop this trend, we absolutely need two, better still three, above-average wet winters,” says Grambow. “But we don’t get them. We only get one poor winter after another.”
When the groundwater is bad, the first thing that hits is the drinking water supply. Because the drinking water in this country is up to 99 percent groundwater. The 2200 water suppliers in the Free State are not only very proud of the high quality of the groundwater in the Free State. But also that it is available in abundance – as a matter of course. Experts like Grambow fear that this matter of course could be lost more and more in the future.
“The prospects are not very encouraging,” says the head of water management.
The Free State is fighting the increasing drought with programs worth millions. Environment Minister Thorsten Faithr (FW) invented the striking title “Water Future Bavaria 2050”. The backbone of the strategy is the so-called Danube-Main-Diversion, through which tens of millions of cubic meters of water have been channeled from the Danube region to Franconia every year since 1993. “With more than 230 million cubic meters of water in the transition, the dry year 2019 was the previous record year,” says Glauber. And over the years, the water in the transition has added up to twice the volume of Lake Ammer in Upper Bavaria.
Bavaria has planned a similarly gigantic system for the drinking water supply. The keyword for this is “transition 2.0”. Head of water management Grambow and his people are planning a drinking water pipeline system from the south-west of Bavaria to the north-east. “It should start at Lake Constance and lead through Franconia to Lower Bavaria,” says Glauber. “In this way we can network the national and regional water suppliers north of the Danube, and they can help each other out quickly and easily in the event of bottlenecks.” It will of course be years before that happens.
Meanwhile, Grambow is looking forward to the summer with great concern. “The prospects are not very encouraging,” says the head of water management. At the DWD they have developed new models for long-term weather forecasts. “Of course, there are still a lot of uncertainties,” says Grambow. “But the scenarios agree on one thing: the summer should also be exceptionally dry again.”