An alternate approach for assessing impacts of climate change on water resources: Combining hazard likelihood and catchment sensitivity

In this paperwe present preliminary results of an alternate approach to the conventional top-down assessment of climate change impact on water resources driven by climate models. A robust transfer function linking atmospheric circulation indices and surface climate is used to predict mean areal monthly precipitation and air temperature estimates at a multi-centennial time-scale (1659-2100), including 13 CMIP5 climate models and two RCP scenarios. By integrating "paleoclimate" reconstructions in the current knowledge of likelihood of climate change, climate hazard assessment is treated as a large number of plausible climate changes instead of being solely expressed as individual CMIP5 projections. Catchment sensitivity to climate change is regarded as changes in peak flows and low flows in a sub-catchment of the transnational Meuse catchment. By combining likelihood of climate change with the knowledge of the sensitivity of a given catchment it is possible to develop a more robust decision-making in water management. © 2016 Taylor & Francis Group, London.