Climate change impacts on snow storages and spring runoff in the Vydra river basin

Climate change impacts on snow storages and spring runoff in the Vydra river basin Abstract As a result of increasing air temperature, the fraction of precipitation falling as snow decreases. This affects snow cover indicators including snow cover duration, snow cover extent and the amount of water that accumulates in snow cover during winter. These changes further propagate through local runoff process and alter winter and spring runoff. The impacts of air temperature warming of 1℃, 2℃ and 3℃ on the above-mentioned indicators were simulated using a conceptual catchment runoff model HBV-light. Multi- criteria calibration, based on functions describing the goodness of fit of simulated runoff and snow water equivalent (SWE) values was performed. The temperature change scenarios were derived using the delta-change method from reference dataset 1980-2014. The indicator changes were evaluated for 5 elevation belts of the catchment as well as for the catchment as a whole, so that the observed alternations of snow cover indicators could be related to the modelled alternations of runoff. The changes in snow cover characteristics based on these simulations include a decrease of snowfall fraction, shortened snow season, decrease in average and maximal SWE values, and the shift of the average day of year of SWEmax to..