Has streamflow changed in the Nordic countries? – Recent trends and comparisons to hydrological projections

Wilson, Donna; Hisdal, Hege; Lawrence, Deborah

doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2010.09.010

Cited by 200 publications

(182 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…We found a small, albeit not statistically significant, negative trend in river high flow, indicating a 0.4 % decrease in 10-year flood frequency each decade. This confirms previous findings reported by Wilson et al (2010) showing a decrease in peak flow events in long time series from Sweden, Finland, and parts of Denmark, but an increase in series from western Norway and Denmark. However, the changes we detected by using future climate projections in Sweden were statistically significant (P = 0.05) and, in some cases, of greater magnitude.…”

Section: Changes In High Flows In Swedensupporting

confidence: 93%

Climate impact on floods: changes in high flows in Sweden in the past and the future (1911–2100)

Arheimer

Lindström

2015

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

122

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Abstract. There is an ongoing discussion whether floods occur more frequently today than in the past, and whether they will increase in number and magnitude in the future. To explore this issue in Sweden, we merged observed time series for the past century from 69 gauging sites throughout the country (450 000 km 2 ) with high-resolution dynamic model projections of the upcoming century. The results show that the changes in annual maximum daily flows in Sweden oscillate between dry and wet periods but exhibit no significant trend over the past 100 years. Temperature was found to be the strongest climate driver of changes in river high flows, which are related primarily to snowmelt in Sweden. Annual daily high flows may decrease by on average −1 % per decade in the future, mainly due to lower peaks from snowmelt in the spring (−2 % per decade) as a result of higher temperatures and a shorter snow season. In contrast, autumn flows may increase by +3 % per decade due to more intense rainfall. This indicates a shift in floodgenerating processes in the future, with greater influence of rain-fed floods. Changes in climate may have a more significant impact on some specific rivers than on the average for the whole country. Our results suggest that the temporal pattern in future daily high flow in some catchments will shift in time, with spring floods in the northern-central part of Sweden occurring about 1 month earlier than today. High flows in the southern part of the country may become more frequent. Moreover, the current boundary between snow-driven floods in northern-central Sweden and rain-driven floods in the south may move toward higher latitudes due to less snow accumulation in the south and at low altitudes. The findings also indicate a tendency in observations toward the modeled projections for timing of daily high flows over the last 25 years. Uncertainties related to both the observed data and the complex model chain of climate impact assessments in hydrology are discussed.

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Section: Changes In High Flows In Swedensupporting

confidence: 93%

Climate impact on floods: changes in high flows in Sweden in the past and the future (1911–2100)

Arheimer

Lindström

2015

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

122

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“…Classical rainfall droughts, however, will become more severe due to lower summer flows in some regions, e.g. southern and eastern Norway (Feyen and Dankers, 2009;Wilson et al, 2010;Wong et al, 2011;Stahl et al, 2011), which is supported by this study, where the remain-ing droughts in the far future last 14-29 % longer and are 26-52 % more severe.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 81%

“…Wilson et al, 2010), and consequently on drought occurrence (PDY, D climates, Table 4). For instance, duration of rain-to-snow-season droughts as identified by Van Loon and Van Lanen (2012) will decrease due to later precipitation as rain in autumn or earlier rain in spring, leading to quicker snowmelt peak.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Future discharge drought across climate regions around the world modelled with a synthetic hydrological modelling approach forced by three general circulation models

Wanders

Lanen

2015

Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. Hydrological drought characteristics (drought in groundwater and streamflow) likely will change in the 21st century as a result of climate change. The magnitude and directionality of these changes and their dependency on climatology and catchment characteristics, however, is uncertain. In this study a conceptual hydrological model was forced by downscaled and bias-corrected outcome from three general circulation models for the SRES A2 emission scenario (GCM forced models), and the WATCH Forcing Data set (reference model). The threshold level method was applied to investigate drought occurrence, duration and severity. Results for the control period show that the drought characteristics of each GCM forced model reasonably agree with the reference model for most of the climate types, suggesting that the climate models' results after post-processing produce realistic outcomes for global drought analyses. For the near future (2021-2050) and far future (2071-2100) the GCM forced models show a decrease in drought occurrence for all major climates around the world and increase of both average drought duration and deficit volume of the remaining drought events. The largest decrease in hydrological drought occurrence is expected in cold (D) climates where global warming results in a decreased length of the snow season and an increased precipitation. In the dry (B) climates the smallest decrease in drought occurrence is expected to occur, which probably will lead to even more severe water scarcity. However, in the extreme climate regions (desert and polar), the drought analysis for the control period showed that projections of hydrological drought characteristics are most uncertain. On a global scale the increase in hydrological drought duration and severity in multiple regions will lead to a higher impact of drought events, which should motivate water resource managers to timely anticipate the increased risk of more severe drought in groundwater and streamflow and to design pro-active measures.

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“…Future climate scenarios generally suggest an increase of precipitation and air temperature in the twenty-first century in Poland and Norway (Madsen et al 2014;Osuch et al 2016). However, there are differences in estimated trends of future flow projections in Europe (Papadimitriou et al 2016;Vautard et al 2016) and in different parts of the world (Wilson et al 2010;Rojas et al 2012;Alfieri et al 2016;Meresa and Gatachew 2016;Kundzewicz et al 2017). The main reasons for those diverse outcomes can be attributed to differences in temporal and spatial scale of rainfall-runoff models applied to transform precipitation into flow, regional and climatic differences, differences in climate projections used as inputs and trend assessment uncertainty.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding changes and trends in projected hydroclimatic indices in selected Norwegian and Polish catchments

2017

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The aim of the study is to investigate trends in selected hydroclimatic indices using novel and conventional tools, for future climate projections in the twentyfirst century. Selected quasi-natural Norwegian and Polish catchments are used as a case study. The projected flows are provided by GR4J rainfall-runoff conceptual model, coupled with an ensemble of climate model projections from EURO-CORDEX initiative. The trends are analysed using conventional Mann-Kendall and modified MannKendall statistical approaches, a time-frequency approach based on discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and the dynamic harmonic regression (DHR) method. Of all methods applied the DHR gives the most conservative trend estimates. Trends depend on the specific hydroclimatic character and flow regime of the catchment. The results confirmed that in catchments with a rainfall-driven flood regime, an increase in the amount of precipitation is followed by increased flows, with strong seasonal changes, whereas, in catchments with a snow-driven flood regime, despite an increase of mean annual flow, decrease in annual maximum flow is observed. Generally, positive trend is the most dominant in all catchments studied and the methods were consistent in detection of trend except in seasonal trend test.

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Has streamflow changed in the Nordic countries? – Recent trends and comparisons to hydrological projections

Cited by 200 publications

References 39 publications

Climate impact on floods: changes in high flows in Sweden in the past and the future (1911–2100)

Climate impact on floods: changes in high flows in Sweden in the past and the future (1911–2100)

Future discharge drought across climate regions around the world modelled with a synthetic hydrological modelling approach forced by three general circulation models

Understanding changes and trends in projected hydroclimatic indices in selected Norwegian and Polish catchments

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