LAUSR.org creates dashboard-style pages of related content for over 1.5 million academic articles. Sign Up to like articles & get recommendations!

A Framework to Quantify the Uncertainty Contribution of GCMs Over Multiple Sources in Hydrological Impacts of Climate Change

Photo from wikipedia

The quantification of climate change impacts on hydrology is subjected to multiple uncertainty sources. Large ensembles of hydrological simulations based on multimodel ensembles (MMEs) have been commonly applied to represent… Click to show full abstract

The quantification of climate change impacts on hydrology is subjected to multiple uncertainty sources. Large ensembles of hydrological simulations based on multimodel ensembles (MMEs) have been commonly applied to represent overall uncertainty of hydrological impacts. However, as increasing numbers of global climate models (GCMs) are being developed, how many GCMs in MMEs are sufficient to characterize overall uncertainty is not clear. Therefore, this study investigates the influences of GCM quantity on quantifying overall uncertainty and uncertainty contributions of multiple sources in hydrological impacts. Large ensembles of hydrological simulations are obtained through the permutation of 3 greenhouse gas emission scenarios, 22 GCMs, 6 downscaling techniques, 5 hydrological models (HMs), and 5 sets of HM parameters, which enables to decompose uncertainty components using analysis of variance. The influences of GCM quantity are investigated by repeatedly conducting uncertainty decomposition for hydrological simulations from subsets with different numbers of GCMs. The results show that GCMs are the leading uncertainty sources in evaluating changes in annual and peak streamflows, while for changes in low flow, other uncertainty sources except HM parameters also have large contributions to overall uncertainty. Furthermore, on the condition of using no more than five GCMs, there are large possibilities that the overall uncertainty and GCMs' uncertainty contribution are underestimated. Using around 10 GCMs can ensure that the median of different combinations generates similar uncertainty components as the whole ensemble. Therefore, it is recommended to use at least 10 GCMs in studies of climate change impacts on hydrology to thoroughly quantify uncertainty.

Keywords: climate change; hydrology; overall uncertainty; uncertainty; hydrological impacts

Journal Title: Earth's Future
Year Published: 2020

Link to full text (if available)


Share on Social Media:                               Sign Up to like & get
recommendations!

Related content

More Information              News              Social Media              Video              Recommended



                Click one of the above tabs to view related content.