Assessment of climate‐change impacts on alpine discharge regimes with climate model uncertainty (original) (raw)

This study analyses the uncertainty induced by the use of different state-of-the-art climate models on the prediction of climate-change impacts on the runoff regimes of 11 mountainous catchments in the Swiss Alps having current proportions of glacier cover between 0 and 50%. The climate-change scenarios analysed are the result of 19 regional climate model (RCM) runs obtained for the period 2070-2099 based on two different greenhouse-gas emission scenarios (the A2 and B2 scenarios defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and on three different coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs), namely HadCM3, ECHAM4/OPYC3 and ARPEGE/OPA. The hydrological response of the study catchments to the climate scenarios is simulated through a conceptual reservoir-based precipitation-runoff transformation model called GSM-SOCONT. For the glacierized catchments, the glacier surface corresponding to these future scenarios is updated through a conceptual glacier surface evolution model.