Utilization of high-resolution data in hydrological modelling for future studies of Tana River

Changing climate is a global reality, and the Nordic region is no exception to this global change. Especially in higher latitudes of the Nordic region, observations have revealed that air and ocean temperature changes are around three times greater than the global average temperature change. This is because the Nordic region is more susceptible to climate change due to a phenomenon called polar amplification. In addition, the water cycle across the globe is intensifying, indicating an increase in extreme events such as flooding. Thus, it is likely that climate change will alter future river discharges, which will eventually have an impact on fluvial processes. On the other hand, human interventions such as land use changes, urbanization, river regulation and sediment mining have all had a significant impact on fluvial dynamics. Our research focuses on the Tana River, which is a transboundary river between Finland and Norway and is one of the northernmost rivers of Fennoscandia. The reach of the Tana River is approximately 350 km and ultimately drains into Tanafjord with an average flow of 170 m^3/s. We intend to employ hydrological modelling on the Tana River catchment to study the fundamental water cycle of the catchment utilizing SWAT+ with implementation of high-resolution datasets in hydrological response units (HRU’s) comprising of topographical layer, land use layer, soil layer and slope layers. To model the current and future hydrology of the catchment including its response to various land use and climate change scenarios, historical and future climate data will be obtained from the modelling outputs of the open-source CMIP-6 project scenarios including Historical, SSP245, SSP370 and SSP585. Continuation of this research is to use these future discharge projections in computational modelling for analysis of fluvial process with unique hyper-resolution bathymetry of the river reach.