Nina Köplin

Robust changes and sources of uncertainty in the projected hydrological regimes of Swiss catchments

Projections of discharge are key for future water resources management. These projections are subject to uncertainties, which are difficult to handle in the decision process on adaptation strategies. Uncertainties arise from different sources such as the emission scenarios, the climate models and their postprocessing, the hydrological models, and the natural variability. Here we present a detailed and quantitative uncertainty assessment, based on recent climate scenarios for Switzerland (CH2011 data set) and covering catchments representative for midlatitude alpine areas. This study relies on a particularly wide range of discharge projections resulting from the factorial combination of 3 emission scenarios, 10–20 regional climate models, 2 postprocessing methods, and 3 hydrological models of different complexity. This enabled us to decompose the uncertainty in the ensemble of projections using analyses of variance (ANOVA). We applied the same modeling setup to six catchments to assess the influence of catchment characteristics on the projected streamflow, and focused on changes in the annual discharge cycle. The uncertainties captured by our setup originate mainly from the climate models and natural climate variability, but the choice of emission scenario plays a large role by the end of the 21st century. The contribution of the hydrological models to the projection uncertainty varied strongly with catchment elevation. The discharge changes were compared to the estimated natural decadal variability, which revealed that a climate change signal emerges even under the lowest emission scenario (RCP2.6) by the end of the century. Limiting emissions to RCP2.6 levels would nevertheless reduce the largest regime changes by the end of the century by approximately a factor of two, in comparison to impacts projected for the high emission scenario SRES A2. We finally show that robust regime changes emerge despite the projection uncertainty. These changes are significant and are consistent across a wide range of scenarios and catchments. We propose their identification as a way to aid decision making under uncertainty.

Robust estimates of climate-induced hydrological change in a temperate mountainous region

A sustainable water resources management depends on sound information about the impacts of climate change. This information is, however, not easily derived because natural runoff variability interferes with the climate change signal. This study presents a procedure that leads to robust estimates of magnitude and Time Of Emergence (TOE) of climate-induced hydrological change that also account for the natural variability contained in the time series. Firstly, natural variability of 189 mesoscale catchments in Switzerland is sampled for 10 ENSEMBLES scenarios for the control (1984–2005) and two scenario periods (near future: 2025–2046, far future: 2074–2095) applying a bootstrap procedure. Then, the sampling distributions of mean monthly runoff are tested for significant differences with the Wilcoxon-Mann–Whitney test and for effect size with Cliff’s delta d. Finally, the TOE of a climate change induced hydrological change is determined when at least eight out of the ten hydrological projections significantly differ from natural variability. The results show that the TOE occurs in the near future period except for high-elevated catchments in late summer. The significant hydrological projections in the near future correspond, however, to only minor runoff changes. In the far future, hydrological change is statistically significant and runoff changes are substantial. Temperature change is the most important factor determining hydrological change in this mountainous region. Therefore, hydrological change depends strongly on a catchment’s mean elevation. Considering that the hydrological changes are predicted to be robust in the near future highlights the importance of accounting for these changes in water resources planning.