Climate change impacts on the seasonality and generation processes of floods in catchments with mixed snowmelt/rainfall regimes: projections and uncertainties

Abstract

Abstract. Climate change is likely to impact the seasonality and generation processes of floods in the Nordic countries, which has direct implications for flood risk assessment, design flood estimation, and hydropower production management. Using a multi-model/multi-parameter approach, we analysed the projected changes in flood seasonality and its underlying generation processes in six catchments with mixed snowmelt/rainfall regimes in Norway. We found that autumn/winter events become more frequent in all catchments considered which leads to an intensification of the current autumn/winter flood regime for the coastal catchments, a reduction of the dominance of spring/summer flood regimes in a high-mountain catchment, and a possible systematic shift in the current flood regimes from spring/summer to autumn/winter in catchments in northern and south-eastern Norway. The changes in flood regimes results from increasing event magnitudes or frequencies, or a combination of both during autumn and winter. Changes towards more dominant autumn/winter events correspond to an increasing relevance of rainfall as a flood generating process (FGP) which is most pronounced in those catchments with the largest shifts in flood seasonality. Here, rainfall replaces snowmelt as the dominant FGP. We further analysed the ensemble components in contributing to overall uncertainty in the projected changes and found that the climate projections and the methods for downscaling or bias-correction tend to be the largest contributors. The relative role of hydrological parameter uncertainty, however, is highest for those catchments showing the largest changes in flood seasonality which confirms the lack of robustness in hydrological model parameterization for simulations under transient hydrometeorological conditions.