Climate change impacts on future snow, ice and rain runoff in a Swiss mountain catchment using multi-dataset calibration

Abstract

Water resources in the Alps are projected to undergo substantial changes in the coming decades. It is therefore essential to explore climate change impacts in catchments with hydropower facilities. We found that the annual runoff dynamics will undergo significant changes with more runoff in winter and less in summer by shifting parts of the summer melt runoff to an earlier peak in spring. We furthermore found that the MDC reduces the uncertainty in the projections of glacial runoff and leads to a different distribution of runoff throughout the year than if calibrated to discharge only. We therefore argue that MDC leads to more consistent model results by representing the runoff generation processes more realistically.