Effect of climate change on the hydrological regime of navigable water courses in Belgium: subreport 5. Comparison of lumped and distributed models in the climate change impact assessment
Vansteenkiste, T.; Pereira, F.; Willems, P.; Mostaert, F. (2012). Effect of climate change on the hydrological regime of navigable water courses in Belgium: subreport 5. Comparison of lumped and distributed models in the climate change impact assessment. Versie 2.0. WL Rapporten, 706_18. Waterbouwkundig Laboratorium/K.U. Leuven: Antwerpen. III, 32 pp. Part of: WL Rapporten. Waterbouwkundig Laboratorium: Antwerpen. , more |
| Available in | Authors | | Document type: Project report
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| Keywords | Climatic changes
Numerical modelling
Water management > Hydraulics > Boundary conditions
Water management > Hydraulics > Conceptual models
Belgium [Marine Regions]
| | Author keywords | Hydrological impact analysis; Distributed models; Lumped models; Model uncertainty |
| Authors | | Top | - Vansteenkiste, T.
- Pereira, F., more
- Willems, P., more
- Mostaert, F., more
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| Abstract | Observational records and climate projections provide abundant evidence that water resources in Belgium have the potential to be strongly impacted by climate change, with wide-ranging consequences for human societies and ecosystems. Impact studies with hydrological models on the effects of climate change are important as they can indicate how the hydrological processes are likely to be affected and how strong they are going to be affected in the future. This is especially relevant for policy makers, who are charged with the responsibility of selecting appropriate adaptation measures. However, in the assessment of the impact, concern might arise on the justification of the application of the hydrological model and the accurateness of the model predictions under changed conditions. Hydrological models may certainly produce consistent results under historical conditions, but they might give projected uncertain results regarding the probable future changes. Therefore, the study 'Effect of climate change on the hydrological regime of navigable water courses' for Flanders Hydraulics at Borgerhout focussed on the determination of the changes of the hydrological system to a number of meteorological factors, which are expected to change in the future for Belgium, by a number of hydrological models. The aim of this study was not only to create an overview of the range of predicted changes to the water resources by an ensemble of hydrological models, but also to assess the influence of the applied hydrological model structure and the complexity of process descriptions on simulated hydrological variables. This report brings together the results of previous research and reports, created within this study.To investigate the uncertainty attributed from the hydrological model structure, several models with different spatial resolutions and process descriptions were considered in the study. Although there are almost countless numbers of model codes, five codes had been chosen to be representative for the different classifications. They range from the simple, lumped, conceptual NAM, PDM and VHM models over the intermediate conceptual-physically based, distributed WetSpa model to the highly detailed, physically based, fully distributed MIKE SHE model, which accounts for the 3-0 groundwater flow and interacts with a MIKE 11 river model to simulate the physical basis of the groundwater-river flow exchange. |
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