Estimation of catchment yield and associated uncertainties due to climate change in a mountainous catchment in Australia

Abstract

This paper examines the impacts of climate change on future water yield with associated uncertainties in a mountainous catchment in Australia using a multi-model approach based on four global climate models (GCMs), 200 realisations (50 realisations from each GCM) of downscaled rainfalls, 2 hydrological models and 6 sets of model parameters. The ensemble projections by the GCMs showed that the mean annual rainfall is likely to reduce in the future decades by 2–5% in comparison with the current climate (1987–2012). The results of ensemble runoff projections indicated that the mean annual runoff would reduce in future decades by 35%. However, considerable uncertainty in the runoff estimates was found as the ensemble results project changes of the 5th (dry scenario) and 95th (wet scenario) percentiles by −73% to +27%, −73% to +12%, −77% to +21% and −80% to +24% in the decades of 2021–2030, 2031–2040, 2061–2070 and 2071–2080, respectively. Results of uncertainty estimation demonstrated that the choice of GCMs dominates overall uncertainty. Realisation uncertainty (arising from repetitive simulations for a given time step during downscaling of the GCM data to catchment scale) of the downscaled rainfall data was also found to be remarkably high. Uncertainty linked to the choice of hydrological models was found to be quite small in comparison with the GCM and realisation uncertainty. The hydrological model parameter uncertainty was found to be lowest among the sources of uncertainties considered in this study. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.