How evaluation of global hydrological models can help to improve credibility of river discharge projections under climate change

Valentina Krysanova (), Jamal Zaherpour, Iulii Didovets, Simon N. Gosling, Dieter Gerten, Naota Hanasaki, Hannes Müller Schmied, Yadu Pokhrel, Yusuke Satoh, Qiuhong Tang and Yoshihide Wada
Additional contact information
Valentina Krysanova: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Iulii Didovets: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Simon N. Gosling: University of Nottingham
Dieter Gerten: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Naota Hanasaki: National Institute for Environmental Studies
Hannes Müller Schmied: Goethe-University Frankfurt
Yadu Pokhrel: Michigan State University
Yusuke Satoh: National Institute for Environmental Studies
Qiuhong Tang: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Yoshihide Wada: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)

Climatic Change, 2020, vol. 163, issue 3, No 12, 1353-1377

Abstract: Abstract Importance of evaluation of global hydrological models (gHMs) before doing climate impact assessment was underlined in several studies. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the performance of six gHMs in simulating observed discharge for a set of 57 large catchments applying common metrics with thresholds for the monthly and seasonal dynamics and summarize them estimating an aggregated index of model performance for each model in each basin. One model showed a good performance, and other five showed a weak or poor performance in most of the basins. In 15 catchments, evaluation results of all models were poor. The model evaluation was supplemented by climate impact assessment for a subset of 12 representative catchments using (1) usual ensemble mean approach and (2) weighted mean approach based on model performance, and the outcomes were compared. The comparison of impacts in terms of mean monthly and mean annual discharges using two approaches has shown that in four basins, differences were negligible or small, and in eight catchments, differences in mean monthly, mean annual discharge or both were moderate to large. The spreads were notably decreased in most cases when the second method was applied. It can be concluded that for improving credibility of projections, the model evaluation and application of the weighted mean approach could be recommended, especially if the mean monthly (seasonal) impacts are of interest, whereas the ensemble mean approach could be applied for projecting the mean annual changes. The calibration of gHMs could improve their performance and, consequently, the credibility of projections.

Keywords: Climate change; Global hydrological models; River discharge projections; Model evaluation; Model performance; Model weighting; Credibility of projections (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10584-020-02840-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:163:y:2020:i:3:d:10.1007_s10584-020-02840-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-020-02840-0

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().