WRINCLE: Water resources - the influence of climate change in Europe

• Research unit: EU RFP
• Project number: 97.0055

Key words (English)

Hydrological modelling; regionalization of parameters; climate change

Alternative project number (English)

EU project number: ENV4-CT97-0452

Research programs (English)

EU-programme: 4. Frame Research Programme - 3.1 Environment

Short description (English)

See abstract

Partners and International Organizations (English)

Coordinator: University of Newcastle upon Tyne (UK)

Abstract (English)

The final objective of the WRINCLE project was to produce the digital runoff and discharge atlas for current and future climate. The atlas was finalized in a common raster format. It can be downloaded from a WorldWide Website at the following URL address: wrsrl.ncl.ac.uk/wrincle/data_src/www/atlas/simplelatlon.html
For each grid cell, mean river discharge characteristics like hydrologic regime, flow duration curves or mean runoff was computed. This was achieved within a theoretical framework relating daily river discharge statistics to both, the parameters of a simple hydrological model and those of a stochastic rainfall model. The hydrological model was first calibrated for a selected set of gauged catchments distributed throughout Western Europe. A study of regionalization was then performed to estimate the model parameters for ungauged catchments or for grid cells. The WRINCLE partners provided the parameters of the stochastic model and the necessary gridded climatic inputs for the present and the future cases. A monthly runoff grid was produced with the theoretical framework for a spatial resolution corresponding to the area of the calibration catchments (i.e. approximately 500 km2). Finally, daily flow-duration curves were derived for each grid cell using a log-normal distribution and the monthly discharge of the major European rivers like the Rhine or the Rhone was obtained by simple spatial aggregation (upscaling) rules.
For the retained climate change scenario, the monthly and annual runoff maps generally show a shift toward lower values. A bigger temporal daily variability has also been observed, implying more frequent and/or more severe droughts. There is a large difference in the estimated impacts between the seasons and the regions. However, the reliability of the outputs within the theoretical framework must be considered with care since many assumptions were required in order to obtain an analytical solution for the daily mean and variance of the flow as well as the reliability of the climatic inputs.
Although developments are required to improve the simulation of the flows, the hydrological model, combined with several temporal and spatial aggregation rules, provides the necessary potential to improve the understanding of runoff and flow patterns over large areas. The model is also very useful in qualitative water resources assessment and long-term forecasting. It is clear that there is a great deal of flexibility available to the researcher investigating effects of climate change on flow response, and that different experiments can produce very different results. To ensure a better assessment of the magnitude of the climate change, sensitivity analyses using various climate scenarios and modeling assumptions are needed and could be done in further studies for more restricted geographical areas.

References in databases (English)

Swiss Database: Euro-DB of the
State Secretariat for Education and Research
Hallwylstrasse 4
CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland
Tel. [phone]
Swiss Project-Number: 97.0055