Articles | Volume 20, issue 7
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-20-2811-2016
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-20-2811-2016
Research article
 | 
13 Jul 2016
Research article |  | 13 Jul 2016

Using dry and wet year hydroclimatic extremes to guide future hydrologic projections

Stephen Oni, Martyn Futter, Jose Ledesma, Claudia Teutschbein, Jim Buttle, and Hjalmar Laudon

Abstract. There are growing numbers of studies on climate change impacts on forest hydrology, but limited attempts have been made to use current hydroclimatic variabilities to constrain projections of future climatic conditions. Here we used historical wet and dry years as a proxy for expected future extreme conditions in a boreal catchment. We showed that runoff could be underestimated by at least 35 % when dry year parameterizations were used for wet year conditions. Uncertainty analysis showed that behavioural parameter sets from wet and dry years separated mainly on precipitation-related parameters and to a lesser extent on parameters related to landscape processes, while uncertainties inherent in climate models (as opposed to differences in calibration or performance metrics) appeared to drive the overall uncertainty in runoff projections under dry and wet hydroclimatic conditions. Hydrologic model calibration for climate impact studies could be based on years that closely approximate anticipated conditions to better constrain uncertainty in projecting extreme conditions in boreal and temperate regions.

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Short summary
This paper presents an important framework to improve hydrologic projections in cold regions. Hydrologic modelling/projections are often based on model calibration to long-term data. Here we used dry and wet years as a proxy to quantify uncertainty in projecting hydrologic extremes. We showed that projections based on long-term data could underestimate runoff by up to 35% in boreal regions. We believe the hydrologic modelling community will benefit from new insights derived from this study.