Identifying and quantifying the impact of climatic and non-climatic drivers on river discharge in Europe

Abstract

Our water resources have changed over the last century through a combination of water management evolutions and climate change. Understanding and decomposing these drivers of discharge changes is essential to preparing and planning adaptive strategies. We propose a methodology combining a physical-based model to reproduce the natural behavior of river catchments and a parsimonious model to serve as a framework of interpretation, comparing the physical-based model outputs to observations of discharge trends. We show that over Europe, especially in the South, the dominant explanations for discharge trends are non-climatic factors. Still, in some catchments of Northern Europe, climate change seems to be the dominating driver of change. We hypothesize that the dominating non-climatic factors are irrigation development, groundwater pumping and other human water usage, which need to be taken into account in physical-based models to understand the main drivers of discharge and project future changes.