Quantifying sensitivity to droughts – an experimental modeling approach

Staudinger, Maria; Weiler, Markus; Seibert, Jan

doi:10.5194/hess-19-1371-2015

Cited by 35 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…The correlation of the dependencies of summer low flows on catchment elevation can be explained by lower air temperature at higher elevation and thus more snow accumulation and may be supported by results of Birsan et al (2005) and Staudinger et al (2015) in Swiss catchments. Staudinger et al (2015) showed that higher-elevation and steeper catch- Figure 8.…”

Section: The Role Of Catchment Propertiesmentioning

confidence: 71%

“…While meteorological drivers and overall catchment storage both affect the drought duration during summer, seasonal storage in snow and glaciers affect the drought deficit . However, snow cannot solely explain the sensitivity to drought, although higher-elevation catchments in the Swiss Alps were found to be less sensitive to drought origin (Staudinger et al, 2015). Additionally, some modelling experiments suggested larger groundwater storages in higher-elevation Swiss catchments which may additionally explain the lower sensitivity of higher-elevation catchments to low flows (Staudinger and Seibert, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Staudinger et al (2015) showed that higher-elevation and steeper catch- Figure 8. Top panels: 7-day minimum discharge in July against maximum SWE for years grouped according to the current precipitation index C PI .…”

Section: The Role Of Catchment Propertiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Importance of maximum snow accumulation for summer low flows in humid catchments

Jeníček

Seibert

Zappa

et al. 2016

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. Winter snow accumulation obviously has an effect on the following catchment runoff. The question is, however, how long this effect lasts and how important it is compared to rainfall inputs. Here we investigate the relative importance of snow accumulation on one critical aspect of runoff, namely the summer low flow. This is especially relevant as the expected increase of air temperature might result in decreased snow storage. A decrease of snow will affect soil and groundwater storages during spring and might cause low streamflow values in the subsequent warm season. To understand these potential climate change impacts, a better evaluation of the effects of inter-annual variations in snow accumulation on summer low flow under current conditions is central. The objective in this study was (1) to quantify how long snowmelt affects runoff after melt-out and (2) to estimate the sensitivity of catchments with different elevation ranges to changes in snowpack. To find suitable predictors of summer low flow we used long time series from 14 Alpine and pre-Alpine catchments in Switzerland and computed different variables quantifying winter and spring snow conditions. In general, the results indicated that maximum winter snow water equivalent (SWE) influenced summer low flow, but could expectedly only partly explain the observed inter-annual variations. On average, a decrease of maximum SWE by 10 % caused a decrease of minimum discharge in July by 6-9 % in catchments higher than 2000 m a.s.l. This effect was smaller in middle-and lower-elevation catchments with a decrease of minimum discharge by 2-5 % per 10 % decrease of maximum SWE. For higher-and middle-elevation catchments and years with below-average SWE maximum, the minimum discharge in July decreased to 70-90 % of its normal level. Additionally, a reduction in SWE resulted in earlier low-flow occurrence in some cases. One other important factor was the precipitation between maximum SWE and summer low flow. When only dry preceding conditions in this period were considered, the importance of maximum SWE as a predictor of low flows increased. We assessed the sensitivity of individual catchments to the change of maximum SWE using the non-parametric Theil-Sen approach as well as an elasticity index. Both sensitivity indicators increased with increasing mean catchment elevation, indicating a higher sensitivity of summer low flow to snow accumulation in Alpine catchments compared to lower-elevation pre-Alpine catchments.

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Section: The Role Of Catchment Propertiesmentioning

confidence: 71%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Importance of maximum snow accumulation for summer low flows in humid catchments

Jeníček

Seibert

Zappa

et al. 2016

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…If the meteorological drought persists for a period of time, it will decrease the soil moisture and river flow, resulting in agricultural and hydrological droughts. Although the rainfall deficit is a primary driver for agricultural and hydrological droughts, terrestrial hydrological processes (e.g., snow melting, evapotranspiration) and geological and topographic conditions also play a nontrivial role in the drought propagation (Van Loon et al, 2012;Rimkus et al, 2013;Teuling et al, 2013;Stoelzle et al, 2014;Staudinger et al, 2015). Therefore, monitoring and forecasting of agricultural and hydrological droughts not only provide more relevant guidelines for the management of agricultural and water resources but also raise challenging scien-5478 X.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding and seasonal forecasting of hydrological drought in the Anthropocene

Yuan

Zhang

Wang

et al. 2017

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

108

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Abstract. Hydrological drought is not only caused by natural hydroclimate variability but can also be directly altered by human interventions including reservoir operation, irrigation, groundwater exploitation, etc. Understanding and forecasting of hydrological drought in the Anthropocene are grand challenges due to complicated interactions among climate, hydrology and humans. In this paper, five decades of naturalized and observed streamflow datasets are used to investigate hydrological drought characteristics in a heavily managed river basin, the Yellow River basin in north China. Human interventions decrease the correlation between hydrological and meteorological droughts, and make the hydrological drought respond to longer timescales of meteorological drought. Due to large water consumptions in the middle and lower reaches, there are 118-262 % increases in the hydrological drought frequency, up to 8-fold increases in the drought severity, 21-99 % increases in the drought duration and the drought onset is earlier. The non-stationarity due to anthropogenic climate change and human water use basically decreases the correlation between meteorological and hydrological droughts and reduces the effect of human interventions on hydrological drought frequency while increasing the effect on drought duration and severity. A set of 29-year (1982-2010) hindcasts from an established seasonal hydrological forecasting system are used to assess the forecast skill of hydrological drought. In the naturalized condition, the climate-model-based approach outperforms the climatology method in predicting the 2001 severe hydrological drought event. Based on the 29-year hindcasts, the former method has a Brier skill score of 11-26 % against the latter for the probabilistic hydrological drought forecasting. In the Anthropocene, the skill for both approaches increases due to the dominant influence of human interventions that have been implicitly incorporated by the hydrological postprocessing, while the difference between the two predictions decreases. This suggests that human interventions can outweigh the climate variability for the hydrological drought forecasting in the Anthropocene, and the predictability for human interventions needs more attention.

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“…The differ-ent behavior can be directly related to the conceptual model complexity, discussed later. For the validation period 2011-2013, including a year with a long dry spell in spring 2011 (Staudinger et al 2015), differences in recharge occur for all simpler models, especially for the SWB and Finch model.…”

Section: Calibration Under Average Climatic Conditions and Validationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The influence of model structure on groundwater recharge rates in climate-change impact studies

2016

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Numerous modeling approaches are available to provide insight into the relationship between climate change and groundwater recharge. However, several aspects of how hydrological model choice and structure affect recharge predictions have not been fully explored, unlike the wellestablished variability of climate model chains-combination of global climate models (GCM) and regional climate models (RCM). Furthermore, the influence on predictions related to subsoil parameterization and the variability of observation data employed during calibration remain unclear. This paper compares and quantifies these different sources of uncertainty in a systematic way. The described numerical experiment is based on a heterogeneous two-dimensional reference model. Four simpler models were calibrated against the output of the reference model, and recharge predictions of both reference and simpler models were compared to evaluate the effect of model structure on climate-change impact studies. The results highlight that model simplification leads to different recharge rates under climate change, especially under extreme conditions, although the different models performed similarly under historical climate conditions. Extreme weather conditions lead to model bias in the predictions and therefore must be considered. Consequently, the chosen calibration strategy is important and, if possible, the calibration data set should include climatic extremes in order to minimise model bias introduced by the calibration. The results strongly suggest that ensembles of climate projections should be coupled with ensembles of hydrogeological models to produce credible predictions of future recharge and with the associated uncertainties.

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Quantifying sensitivity to droughts – an experimental modeling approach

Cited by 35 publications

References 35 publications

Importance of maximum snow accumulation for summer low flows in humid catchments

Importance of maximum snow accumulation for summer low flows in humid catchments

Understanding and seasonal forecasting of hydrological drought in the Anthropocene

The influence of model structure on groundwater recharge rates in climate-change impact studies

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