This session focusses on hydrological response to changes in climatic forcing at multi-annual to multi-decadal timescales. Catchments are complex systems responding to changes in climate, among external factors, on a variety of timescales and with many interacting processes. The poor performance of models in representing these responses suggests they potentially misrepresent (or omit) important catchment processes, process timescales, or interactions between processes. To improve hydrological models, the multitude of responses, interactions and feedbacks developing in hydrological systems need to be disentangled and understood. Such insights can originate both from site-specific investigations or from studies that use large datasets and/or models to critique or improve hydrological simulations under changing conditions.
This session covers themes such as (but not limited to):
1. Better understanding of hydrological and/or biophysical processes that govern hydrological response to long-timescale (multi-annual or longer) climate shifts – insights from field and modelling applications;
2. Studies of hydrological regularities (e.g. the Budyko hypothesis) for predictions under changing conditions;
3. Characterising catchment multi-annual “memory” and its representation in models; and
4. Efforts to improve the realism and robustness of hydrological simulations under climatic variability, change and future scenarios.