| Popis: |
Climate change modifies the magnitude and timing of precipitation, temperature patterns, and snow dynamics. Hence, it can have a huge impact on water resources, conditioning their availability and generating great losses due, for example, to draughts and floods. Climate models can provide future scenarios but, in order to assess the consequences on the water cycle, they need to be coupled with reliable hydrological models. A desirable feature of such models is that they are realistic in their process representation, as operative conditions (e.g. future climate), can be very different from the ones under which the model is developed and calibrated. Hence, hydrological models, in order to be credible, they have to be subjected to stringent scrutiny. In this work, we present a procedure to construct conceptual, semi-distributed hydrological models that operate at the catchment scale. The procedure consists in constraining the models to match relevant signatures of the variability of catchment responses, and in testing them in space-time validation. The procedure is shown for the Thur catchment in Switzerland, with 10 internal subcatchments. We show that the application of the proposed approach results in hydrological models that produce reliable results also in conditions that are different from calibration, and therefore are potentially useful in climate change scenarios. |
