Impacts of hydrological model calibration on projected hydrological changes under climate change—a multi-model assessment in three large river basins (original) (raw)
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Environmental Research Letters
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Journal of Hydrometeorology, 2006
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The effect of model calibration on the projection of climate change impact on hydrological indicators was assessed by employing variants of a pan-European hydrological model driven by forcing data from an ensemble of climate models. The hydrological model was calibrated using three approaches: calibration at the outlets of major river basins, regionalization through calibration of smaller scale catchments with unique catchment characteristics, and building a model ensemble by sampling model parameters from the regionalized model. The large-scale patterns of the change signals projected by all model variants were found to be similar for the different indicators. Catchment scale differences were observed between the projections of the model calibrated for the major river basins and the other two model variants. The distributions of the median change signals projected by the ensemble model were found to be similar to the distributions of the change signals projected by the regionalized...
Proceedings of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences, 2018
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Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 2013
In climate change impact research, the assessment of future river runoff as well as the catchment-scale water balance is impeded by different sources of modeling uncertainty. Some research has already been done in order to quantify the uncertainty of climate projections originating from the climate models and the downscaling techniques, as well as from the internal variability evaluated from climate model member ensembles. Yet, the use of hydrological models adds another layer of uncertainty. Within the QBic3 project (Québec–Bavarian International Collaboration on Climate Change), the relative contributions to the overall uncertainty from the whole model chain (from global climate models to water management models) are investigated using an ensemble of multiple climate and hydrological models. Although there are many options to downscale global climate projections to the regional scale, recent impact studies tend to use regional climate models (RCMs). One reason for that is that the...
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Journal of Hydrometeorology, 2014
The assessment of climate change impacts on water resources involves several methodological decisions, including choices of global climate models (GCMs), emission scenarios, downscaling techniques, and hydrologic modeling approaches. Among these, hydrologic model structure selection and parameter calibration are particularly relevant and usually have a strong subjective component. The goal of this research is to improve understanding of the role of these decisions on the assessment of the effects of climate change on hydrologic processes. The study is conducted in three basins located in the Colorado headwaters region, using four different hydrologic model structures [PRMS, VIC, Noah LSM, and Noah LSM with multiparameterization options (Noah-MP)]. To better understand the role of parameter estimation, model performance and projected hydrologic changes (i.e., changes in the hydrology obtained from hydrologic models due to climate change) are compared before and after calibration with...
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We present one of the first climate change impact assessments on river runoff that utilises an ensemble of global hydrological models (Glob-HMs) and an ensemble of catchment-scale hydrological models (Cat-HMs), across multiple catchments: the upper Amazon, Darling, Ganges, Lena, upper Mississippi, upper Niger, Rhine and Tagus. Relative changes in simulated mean annual runoff (MAR) and four indicators of high and low extreme Climatic Change flows are compared between the two ensembles. The ensemble median values of changes in runoff with three different scenarios of global-mean warming (1, 2 and 3°C above preindustrial levels) are generally similar between the two ensembles, although the ensemble spread is often larger for the Glob-HM ensemble. In addition the ensemble spread is normally larger than the difference between the two ensemble medians. Whilst we find compelling evidence for projected runoff changes for the Rhine (decrease), Tagus (decrease) and Lena (increase) with global warming, the sign and magnitude of change for the other catchments is unclear. Our model results highlight that for these three catchments in particular, global climate change mitigation, which limits global-mean temperature rise to below 2°C above preindustrial levels, could avoid some of the hydrological hazards that could be seen with higher magnitudes of global warming.