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Found 1 result for Matteo Ghilardi[Author]
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. 2014 Oct 6;9(10):e109053.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0109053. eCollection 2014.

Investigation of climate change impact on water resources for an Alpine basin in northern Italy: implications for evapotranspiration modeling complexity

Giovanni Ravazzani  1 , Matteo Ghilardi  1 , Thomas Mendlik  2 , Andreas Gobiet  2 , Chiara Corbari  1 , Marco Mancini  1
Affiliations
Free PMC article

Investigation of climate change impact on water resources for an Alpine basin in northern Italy: implications for evapotranspiration modeling complexity

Giovanni Ravazzani et al. PLoS One. .
Free PMC article

Abstract

Assessing the future effects of climate change on water availability requires an understanding of how precipitation and evapotranspiration rates will respond to changes in atmospheric forcing. Use of simplified hydrological models is required because of lack of meteorological forcings with the high space and time resolutions required to model hydrological processes in mountains river basins, and the necessity of reducing the computational costs. The main objective of this study was to quantify the differences between a simplified hydrological model, which uses only precipitation and temperature to compute the hydrological balance when simulating the impact of climate change, and an enhanced version of the model, which solves the energy balance to compute the actual evapotranspiration. For the meteorological forcing of future scenario, at-site bias-corrected time series based on two regional climate models were used. A quantile-based error-correction approach was used to downscale the regional climate model simulations to a point scale and to reduce its error characteristics. The study shows that a simple temperature-based approach for computing the evapotranspiration is sufficiently accurate for performing hydrological impact investigations of climate change for the Alpine river basin which was studied.

Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Localization of the stations on a DEM of the Toce watershed.
Figure 2
Figure 2. Scheme of the primary features common to the FEST-WB and FEST-EWB distributed-hydrological models.
Figure 3
Figure 3. Comparison between the simulated and observed hourly discharge from the FEST-WB and FEST-EWB hydrological models.
Figure 4
Figure 4. Mean monthly and cumulated actual evapotranspiration as computed by the FEST-WB and FEST-EWB hydrological models driven by meteorological observations.
Figure 5
Figure 5. Mean flow duration curves for 2001–2010 from the observed discharges and those simulated by the FEST-WB and FEST-EWB hydrological models driven by meteorological observations.
Figure 6
Figure 6. Mean monthly precipitation and temperature for 2001–2010 as simulated by the REMO and RegCM3 regional climate models and their deviations versus the observations.
Figure 7
Figure 7. Mean monthly and cumulated actual evapotranspiration as computed for 2001–2010 by the FEST-EWB (left) and FEST-WB (right) hydrological models driven by the REMO and RegCM3 regional climate models and the weather observations during the control period (2001–2010).
Figure 8
Figure 8. Mean flow duration curves simulated by the FEST-EWB (left) and FEST-WB (right) hydrological models driven by meteorological observations and the simulated climatic forcings by the REMO and RegCM3 regional climate models.
Figure 9
Figure 9. Mean monthly precipitation and temperature for the period 2041–2050 as projected by REMO and RegCM3 regional climate models versus the control period (2001–2010): (a) precipitation by REMO; (b) precipitation by RegCM3; (c) temperature by REMO; and (d) temperature by RegCM3.
Figure 10
Figure 10. Mean monthly and cumulated actual evapotranspiration for the period 2041–2050 as simulated by the FEST-WB and FEST-EWB hydrological models driven by the REMO or RegCM3 regional climate models versus the control period (2001–2010): (a) FEST-EWB driven by REMO; (b) FEST-WB driven by REMO; (c) FEST-EWB driven by RegCM3; and (d) FEST WB driven by RegCM3.
Figure 11
Figure 11. Mean flow duration curve for the period 2041–2050 as simulated by the FEST-WB and FEST-EWB hydrological models driven by the REMO or RegCM3 regional climate models versus the control period (2001–2010): a) FEST-EWB driven by REMO, b) FEST-WB driven by REMO, c) FEST-EWB driven by RegCM3, and d) FEST WB driven by RegCM3.
Figure 12
Figure 12. Mean monthly discharge for the period 2041–2050 as simulated by the FEST-WB and FEST-EWB hydrological models driven by the REMO or RegCM3 regional climate models versus the control period (2001–2010): a) FEST-EWB driven by REMO, b) FEST-WB driven by REMO, c) FEST-EWB driven by RegCM3, and d) FEST WB driven by RegCM3.
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Grant support

This work was supported by ACQWA EU/FP7 project (grant number 212250) “Assessing Climate impacts on the Quantity and quality of WAter” [link:http://www.acqwa.ch]. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.