Why does a conceptual hydrological model fail to correctly predict discharge changes in response to climate change?

Duethmann, Doris; Blöschl, Günter; Parajka, Juraj

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-3493-2020

Articles | Volume 24, issue 7

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-3493-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-3493-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 24, issue 7

Research article

| Highlight paper

|

13 Jul 2020

Research article | Highlight paper |

| 13 Jul 2020

Why does a conceptual hydrological model fail to correctly predict discharge changes in response to climate change?

Doris Duethmann, Günter Blöschl, and Juraj Parajka

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-3493-2020-supplement

Data sets

ehyd - Hydrographic data and analyses BMLRT https://ehyd.gv.at/

Corine Land Cover 2000 seamless vector data (Version 18.5) European Environment Agency https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/clc-2000-vector-6

An extended AVHRR 8-km NDVI dataset compatible with MODIS and SPOT vegetation NDVI data (https://ecocast.arc.nasa.gov/data/pub/gimms/) C. J. Tucker, J. E. Pinzon, M. E. Brown, D. A. Slayback, E. W. Pak, R. Mahoney, E. F. Vermote, and N. El Saleous https://doi.org/10.1080/01431160500168686

Short summary

We investigate why a conceptual hydrological model failed to correctly predict observed discharge changes in response to increasing precipitation and air temperature in 156 Austrian catchments. Simulations indicate that poor model performance is related to two problems, namely a model structure that neglects changes in vegetation dynamics and inhomogeneities in precipitation data caused by changes in stations density with time. Other hypotheses did not improve simulated discharge changes.