Abstract
Abstract
Severe river floods often result in huge economic losses and fatalities. Since 1980,
almost 1500 such events have been reported in Europe. This study investigates climate
change impacts on European floods under 1.5, 2, and 3 K global warming. The impacts
are assessed employing a multi-model ensemble containing three hydrologic models
(HMs: mHM, Noah-MP, PCR-GLOBWB) forced by five CMIP5 general circulation models
(GCMs) under three Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs 2.6, 6.0, and 8.5).
This multi-model ensemble is unprecedented with respect to the combination of its
size (45 realisations) and its spatial resolution, which is 5 km over the entirety of
Europe. Climate change impacts are quantified for high flows and flood events,
represented by 10% exceedance probability and annual maxima of daily streamflow,
respectively. The multi-model ensemble points to the Mediterranean region as a
hotspot of changes with significant decrements in high flows from −11% at 1.5 K up to
−30% at 3 K global warming mainly resulting from reduced precipitation. Small changes
(< ±10%) are observed for river basins in Central Europe and the British Isles
under different levels of warming. Projected higher annual precipitation increases
high flows in Scandinavia, but reduced snow melt equivalent decreases flood events in
this region. Neglecting uncertainties originating from internal climate variability,
downscaling technique, and hydrologic model parameters, the contribution by the GCMs
to the overall uncertainties of the ensemble is in general higher than that by the
HMs. The latter, however, have a substantial share in the Mediterranean and
Scandinavia. Adaptation measures for limiting the impacts of global warming could be
similar under 1.5 K and 2 K global warming, but have to account for significantly
higher changes under 3 K global warming.
Funder
NWO Rubicon
Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung
Subject
Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health,General Environmental Science,Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
Cited by
108 articles.
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