Abstract
AbstractWe present a new ensemble of daily runoff simulations for meso‐scale catchments in Switzerland for the period 1981–2099: The Hydro‐CH2018‐Runoff ensemble. The ensemble contains runoff simulations for 93 catchments in Switzerland covering a wide range of different catchment characteristics governed by pluvial, nival and glacial runoff regimes. The hydrological modelling system PREVAH was thoroughly calibrated and validated for each catchment. The simulations show satisfactory performance with a median Nash‐Sutcliffe efficiency of 0.82 in the calibration and validation period. The calibrated parameters were then used to simulate runoff under climate change for each of the 93 catchments. These simulations were driven by the high‐resolution new Swiss climate change scenarios (CH2018) consisting of 68 GCM‐RCM combinations covering 3 different emission scenarios: RCP2.6, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5. The simulations show good agreement between simulated and observed runoff regimes in the reference period. The Hydro‐CH2018‐Runoff ensemble is publicly available under http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3937485 (Muelchi, R., Rössler, O., Schwanbeck, J., Weingartner, R., and Martius, O. (2020) Hydro‐CH2018‐Runoff ensemble (version v1). Zenodo) and can be used for further impact studies.
Highlights
Climate change influences all components of the hydrological cycle mainly due to changing precipitation patterns and increasing temperatures (IPCC, 2013)
A total of 93 catchments distributed across Switzerland covering many different catchment characteristics were successfully calibrated and show satisfactory performance both in terms of NSE and KGE and in terms of reproduction of the runoff regimes
Runoff simulations for these catchments were fed with the CH2018 high-resolution climate change scenarios for Switzerland
Summary
Climate change influences all components of the hydrological cycle mainly due to changing precipitation patterns and increasing temperatures (IPCC, 2013). This includes water on the Earth's surface such as rivers. River runoff scenarios serve as an important basis for adaptation planning and highlight the impact and benefits of potential mitigation measures. They support governments and planning bodies as well as economy and agriculture in their decision-making. The studies cited above are based on climate change scenarios using a delta change approach.
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