Impact of climate change on the hydrological cycle of the Great Alpine region by means of regional climate convection permitting high resolution simulations and hydrological model simulations.

In the last 10 years, the very high resolution regional climate models have started to be used and recently the newly available regional climate model ensemble for the Great Alpine region, at the convection permitting (CP-RCM) resolution (> 3 km), has been released by the CORDEX Flagship Pilot Study on Convective phenomena at high resolution over Europe and the Mediterranean (FPSCONV). At such resolution, the improvement of the representation of local hydrological processes becomes relevant because the climate impact on the hydrological cycle at that scale is expected to be much better captured.  

To this aim, the CETEMPS hydrological model (CHyM) is used coupled off-line with the different CP-RCM ensemble members.  The model has been run in two different configurations, using either temperature and precipitation from the driving CP-RCM or directly the runoff. The hydrological simulation ensemble has been validated against local station data for the Po river and central Italian river basins, by using hydrological indicators, such as the Kling–Gupta efficiency (KGE). The climate change projections are compared with previous lower resolution simulation driven by convection parametrized regional climate models from the Euro-CORDEX ensemble.