Abstract
Abstract. Over the recent years, several research efforts investigated the impact of climate change on water resources for different regions of the world. The projection of future river flows is affected by different sources of uncertainty in the hydro-climatic modelling chain. One of the aims of the QBic3 project (Québec-Bavarian International Collaboration on Climate Change) is to assess the contribution to uncertainty of hydrological models by using an ensemble of hydrological models presenting a diversity of structural complexity (i.e., lumped, semi distributed and distributed models). The study investigates two humid, mid-latitude catchments with natural flow conditions; one located in Southern Québec (Canada) and one in Southern Bavaria (Germany). Daily flow is simulated with four different hydrological models, forced by outputs from regional climate models driven by global climate models over a reference (1971–2000) and a future (2041–2070) period. The results show that, for our hydrological model ensemble, the choice of model strongly affects the climate change response of selected hydrological indicators, especially those related to low flows. Indicators related to high flows seem less sensitive on the choice of the hydrological model.
Highlights
The study of climate change impact on water resources has improved our understanding of the interactions between climate and hydrological processes
The aim of the present study is to assess the contribution of hydrological models to uncertainty in the climate change signal for water resources management
The differences from observations are used to assess the performance of the hydrological model ensemble (Sect. 3.1)
Summary
The study of climate change impact on water resources has improved our understanding of the interactions between climate and hydrological processes. Water availability will be affected at various levels by the anticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, atmospheric and oceanic circulations and other climate variables depending on the scenarios and the investigated regions. The climate change impact on evapotranspiration, rainfall, runoff and water availability has been shown to be affected by the uncertainty associated to climate scenarios (Xu, 1999). Hydrologists have to work with these uncertain projections, taking into account the underlying assumptions on climate scenarios in their investigation on how and why runoff and hydrological responses are changing (Bloschl and Montanari, 2010)
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