Natural climate variability is an important aspect of future projections of snow water resources and rain-on-snow events
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Published:2022-09-01
Issue:9
Volume:16
Page:3469-3488
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ISSN:1994-0424
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Container-title:The Cryosphere
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language:en
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Short-container-title:The Cryosphere
Author:
Schirmer MichaelORCID, Winstral Adam, Jonas Tobias, Burlando Paolo, Peleg NadavORCID
Abstract
Abstract. Climate projection studies of future changes in snow conditions and
resulting rain-on-snow (ROS) flood events are subject to large
uncertainties. Typically, emission scenario uncertainties and climate model
uncertainties are included. This is the first study on this topic to also
include quantification of natural climate variability, which is the dominant
uncertainty for precipitation at local scales with large implications for runoff projections, for example. To quantify natural climate variability, a weather
generator was applied to simulate inherently consistent climate variables
for multiple realizations of current and future climates at 100 m spatial
and hourly temporal resolution over a 12×12 km high-altitude study area in
the Swiss Alps. The output of the weather generator was used as input for
subsequent simulations with an energy balance snow model. The climate change
signal for snow water resources stands out as early as mid-century from the
noise originating from the three sources of uncertainty investigated, namely
uncertainty in emission scenarios, uncertainty in climate models, and
natural climate variability. For ROS events, a climate change signal toward
more frequent and intense events was found for an RCP 8.5 scenario at high
elevations at the end of the century, consistently with other studies.
However, for ROS events with a substantial contribution of snowmelt to
runoff (> 20 %), the climate change signal was largely masked
by sources of uncertainty. Only those ROS events where snowmelt does not
play an important role during the event will occur considerably more
frequently in the future, while ROS events with substantial snowmelt
contribution will mainly occur earlier in the year but not more frequently.
There are two reasons for this: first, although it will rain more frequently
in midwinter, the snowpack will typically still be too cold and dry and thus
cannot contribute significantly to runoff; second, the very rapid decline in
snowpack toward early summer, when conditions typically prevail for
substantial contributions from snowmelt, will result in a large decrease in
ROS events at that time of the year. Finally, natural climate variability is
the primary source of uncertainty in projections of ROS metrics until the
end of the century, contributing more than 70 % of the total uncertainty.
These results imply that both the inclusion of natural climate variability
and the use of a snow model, which includes a physically based process
representation of water retention, are important for ROS projections at the
local scale.
Publisher
Copernicus GmbH
Subject
Earth-Surface Processes,Water Science and Technology
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