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Title

Streamflow response to regional climate model output in the mountainous watershed: a case study from the Swiss Alps
Authors
Rahman, Kazi
Etienne, Christophe
Gago Da Silva, Ana
Maringanti, Chetan
Beniston, Martin
Lehmann, Anthony
Published in Environmental Earth Sciences. 2014, vol. 72, no. 11, p. 4357-4369
Abstract Regional climate model (RCM) outputs are often used in hydrological modeling, in particular for streamflow forecasting. The heterogeneity of the meteorological variables such as precipitation, temperature, wind speed and solar radiation often limits the ability of the hydrological model performance. This paper assessed the sensitivity of RCM outputs from the PRUDENCE project and their performance in reproducing the streamflow. The soil and water assessment tool was used to simulate the streamflow of the Rhone River watershed located in the southwestern part of Switzerland, with the climate variables obtained from four RCMs. We analyzed the difference in magnitude of precipitation, maximum and minimum air temperature, and wind speed with respect to the observed values from the meteorological stations. In addition, we also focused on the impact of the grid resolution on model performance, by analyzing grids with resolutions of 50 × 50 and 25 × 25 km2. The variability of the meteorological inputs from various RCMs is quite severe in the studied watershed. Among the four different RCMs, the Danish Meteorological Institute provided the best performance when simulating runoff. We found that temperature lapse rate is significantly important in the mountainous snow and glacier dominated watershed as compared to other variables like precipitation, and wind speed for hydrological performance. Therefore, emphasis should be given to minimum and maximum temperature in the bias correction studies for downscaling climatic data for impact modeling in the mountainous snow and glacier dominated complex watersheds.
Keywords Hydrology — Climate change — Alps
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Article (Published version) (2.2 MB) - document accessible for UNIGE members only Limited access to UNIGE
Other version: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12665-014-3336-0
Structures
Centres et instituts / Institut des sciences de l'environnement
Research groups TIGERS
Envirospace Lab
Climatologie
ISE Pôle Sciences
ISE Pôle Informatique environnementale
ISE Climat
ISE Eau
Project FP7: ACQWA
Citation
(ISO format) 		RAHMAN, Kazi et al. Streamflow response to regional climate model output in the mountainous watershed: a case study from the Swiss Alps. In: Environmental Earth Sciences, 2014, vol. 72, n° 11, p. 4357-4369. doi: 10.1007/s12665-014-3336-0 https://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:38057

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Deposited on : 2014-06-24

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