On the Global Consistency of Climate Impacts on Seasonal River Flow Regimes in Snow-Influenced Catchments

The impact of climate on seasonal streamflow regimes is generally well understood in a qualitative sense, and forms the basis for classifications of streamflow regimes (e.g. pluvial, nival, glacial etc). However, these classifications are mainly descriptive, and have limited resolution since the number of classes is small. Hydrology would be further advanced if (i) we could make a quantitative synthesis using hydrological process knowledge, and (ii) we could resolve in more detail the differences between catchments which belong to the same class.

In this presentation we focus on the seasonal flow regimes of snow-influenced catchments, making use of large sample data sets such as the EStreams data as well as CAMELS data (USA, Chile).  There is a substantial body of research on how climate affects the streamflow regimes of snow-affected catchments of the (western) USA, but only limited synthesis beyond this region. Here we will start to examine the extent to which lessons learned from US seasonal snow hydrology are transferable elsewhere, and explore the reasons for differences.