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Zusammenfassung:
Flood properties are known to be sensitive to spatial and temporal patterns of precipitation, which in turn are affected by global warming. In this study, we investigated the effect of global warming on properties of heavy precipitation events (HPEs) in the eastern Mediterranean, focusing on hydrologically-important characteristics, including total precipitation amount, coverage area, precipitation duration and the distribution of rain rates for different durations. We further quantified how changes in precipitation due to global warming affect resulting flood properties for small-medium catchments in the study region.
We used the WRF model to simulate 41 HPEs at high resolution in present and future (end of 21st century; RCP 8.5 scenario) climate conditions. The calibrated GB-HYDRA distributed hydrological model was utilized to simulate floods from those HPEs in 4 small-medium-size basins (18–69 km2). To account for the rainfall spatial uncertainty in the simulations, spatial shifts were applied to the simulated HPEs in the range of 20 km north and south.
We found that, with global warming, HPEs in the eastern Mediterranean are becoming drier and more spatiotemporally concentrated (smaller rainy areas with higher rain rates). Consequently, we foresee a decrease in both flood volume (-27%) and peak discharge (-20%, non-significant) at the outlet of the catchments. On the other hand, small sub-catchments (< 5 km2) present an opposite behavior, where their flood peak discharge is increasing in the future.
