A comparative analysis of projected impacts of climate change on river runoff from global and catchment-scale hydrological models
In: Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, Jg. 15 (2011), Heft 1, S. 279-294
Online
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Zugriff:
We present a comparative analysis of projected impacts of climate change on river runoff from two types of distributed hydrological model, a global hydrological model (GHM) and catchment-scale hydrological models (CHM). Analyses are conducted for six catchments that are global in coverage and feature strong contrasts in spatial scale as well as climatic and developmental conditions. These include the Liard (Canada), Mekong (SE Asia), Okavango (SW Africa), Rio Grande (Brazil), Xiangxi (China) and Harper's Brook (UK). A single GHM (Mac-PDM.09) is applied to all catchments whilst different CHMs are applied for each catchment. The CHMs include SLURP v. 12.2 (Liard), SLURP v. 12.7 (Mekong), Pitman (Okavango), MGB-IPH (Rio Grande), AV-SWAT-X 2005 (Xiangxi) and Cat-PDM (Harper's Brook). The CHMs typically simulate water resource impacts based on a more explicit representation of catchment water resources than that available from the GHM and the CHMs include river routing, whereas the GHM does not. Simulations of mean annual runoff, mean monthly runoff and high (Q5) and low (Q95) monthly runoff under baseline (1961–1990) and climate change scenarios are presented. We compare the simulated runoff response of each hydrological model to (1) prescribed increases in global-mean air temperature of 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0 and 6.0 °C relative to baseline from the UKMO HadCM3 Global Climate Model (GCM) to explore response to different amounts of climate forcing, and (2) a prescribed increase in global-mean air temperature of 2.0 °C relative to baseline for seven GCMs to explore response to climate model structural uncertainty. We find that the differences in projected changes of mean annual runoff between the two types of hydrological model can be substantial for a given GCM (e.g. an absolute GHM-CHM difference in mean annual runoff percentage change for UKMO HadCM3 2 °C warming of up to 25%), and they are generally larger for indicators of high and low monthly runoff. However, they are relatively small in comparison to the ...
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A comparative analysis of projected impacts of climate change on river runoff from global and catchment-scale hydrological models
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Autor/in / Beteiligte Person: | Gosling, S. N. ; Taylor, R. G. ; Arnell, N. W. ; Todd, M. C. |
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Zeitschrift: | Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, Jg. 15 (2011), Heft 1, S. 279-294 |
Veröffentlichung: | Copernicus Publications, 2011 |
Medientyp: | academicJournal |
ISSN: | 1027-5606 (print) ; 1607-7938 (print) |
DOI: | 10.5194/hess-15-279-2011 |
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