Uncertainty Analysis of Climate Change Impact on River Flow Extremes Based on a Large Multi-Model Ensemble

Water managers are faced with a changing climate in the decision-making process while adaptation and mitigation strategies need to be developed. The climate change impact towards the end of the century, however, is highly uncertain and coping with this is a great challenge for decision makers. Over the recent years, combined efforts of hydrologists and climatologists have led to many climate change impact studies on water resources. However, most studies only use a limited ensemble size and/or focus on only one contributing source and hence possibly underestimate the total uncertainty. For two Belgian catchments, we simulated daily flow with five different lumped conceptual hydrological models and ten different parameter sets each, forced by the output of 24 global climate models covering four different emission scenarios, combined with 9 different downscaling methods over reference (1961–1990) and future (2071–2100) periods, resulting in a large multi-model ensemble with 41,850 members. Results show that both low and peak flows would become more extreme in the future, and these changes are stronger with increased radiative forcing. The most important uncertainty sources in low-flow projections are the global climate models (explaining 27–36% of the total variance) and the hydrological model structure (34–42%). For peak flow projections, these are global climate models (32–39%) and statistical downscaling methods (21–26%). Also, interaction effects account for a significant part of the uncertainty (24–38%). The results of this study illustrate that one might end up with biased results and overly confident conclusions when only focusing on some of the uncertainty sources in multi-model ensembles.