A 500-year annual runoff reconstruction for 14 selected European catchments

Since the beginning of this century, Europe has been experiencing severe drought events (2003, 2007, 2010, 2018 and 2019) which have had an adverse impacts on various sectors, such as agriculture, forestry, water management, health,and ecosystems. During the last few decades, projections of the impact of climate change on hydroclimatic extremes were often capable of reproducing changes in the characteristics of these extremes. Recently, the research interest has been extended to include reconstructions of hydro-climatic conditions, so as to provide historical context for present and future extremes. While there are available reconstructions of temperature, precipitation, drought indicators, or the 20th century runofffor Europe, multi-century annual runoff reconstructions are still lacking. In this study, we have used reconstructed precipitation and temperature data, Palmer Drought Severity Index and available observed runoff across fourteen European catchments in order to develop annual runoff reconstructions for the period 1500–2000 using two data-driven and one conceptual lumped hydrological model. The comparison to observed runoff data has shown a good match between the reconstructed and observed runoff and their characteristics, particularly deficit volumes. On the other hand, the validation of input precip-itation fields revealed an underestimation of the variance across most of Europe, which is propagated into the reconstructedrunoff series. The reconstructed runoff is available via figshare, an open source scientific data repository, under the DOIhttps://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.15178107, (Sadaf et al., 2021).