Hydrology–Climate Interactions

In recent decades, climate change has been recognized as one of the major threats to hydrology and water resource systems. Ongoing and future climate change is expected to affect the hydrological cycle at a global scale, but the effects and magnitude of the impacts at the regional level are very different. While in some regions, climate change has led to an increase in precipitation occurrence with a consequent growth of the flood risk, in other regions, it enhances the risk of drought and creates additional stresses over water resources. This unusual precipitation pattern, with changes in quantity, frequency, and intensity of rainfall, significantly affects streamflow, soil moisture, and water availability, with direct consequences on water supply, the environment, infrastructure, and ecosystems, and indirect consequences on socioeconomic behavior, as water is a critical element for human activities, human communities, and local economies. The recent availability of ground and satellite monitoring sources has led to significant progress in the investigation of the effects of climatic variability and climate changes on the hydrological regime, and water quality. Improved general circulation models (GCM) have provided tools for projecting into the future potential temperature and precipitation variations, which heavily impact water resources’ availability in the form of ensembles with the possibility of assessing future aleatoric uncertainty. Economic, environmental, and social issues have also become prominent in water resources research; thus, interdisciplinary approaches have been adopted since the assessments of climate change impacts require high integration among disciplines.

Aim

“Hydrology–Climate Interactions” aims to promote interdisciplinary approaches that seek to understand how the hydrosphere, biosphere, and climate interact, the extent to which these interactions reflect ongoing Earth system changes, and the implications for current and future societies. Moreover, it aims to clarify open questions such as how to best use ensemble projection information to adopt the most profitable adaptation strategies and/or how to possibly extend the current extreme value analyses to a non-stationary future. It is possible to achieve all these goals by considering, e.g., computer-based models, new techniques for statistical evaluation and uncertainty assessment, and innovative methods for data analysis that allow enhancement in hydrology by detecting changes in hydrological elements, at different spatial and temporal scales, and by identifying the causes for these changes.

Scope

• Detection of changes in climatic and hydrological elements
• Analysis of hydrological extremes
• Climate general circulation modeling
• Physical and mathematical approaches
• Numerical climate projections
• A transdisciplinary approach to climate analysis and modeling
• Surface and subsurface catchment hydrology
• Impacts of climatic and land-use change on natural hydrologic processes
• Hydrologic process observations, modeling, and prediction
• Climate change analysis, time series analysis, historic trend predictions
• Uncertainty assessment in climate change and climate projections
• Water resources management (surface water, groundwater, coastal water, etc.)
• Remote sensing and GIS for climate change impact assessment