A 500-year annual runoff reconstruction for 14 selected European catchments

Abstract

Since the beginning of this century, Europe has been experiencing severe drought events (2003, 2007, 2010, 2018 and 2019) which have had adverse impacts on various sectors, such as agriculture, forestry, water management, health and ecosystems. During the last few decades, projections of the impact of climate change on hydroclimatic extremes have often been used for quantification of changes in the characteristics of these extremes. Recently, the research interest has been extended to include reconstructions of hydroclimatic conditions to provide historical context for present and future extremes. While there are available reconstructions of temperature, precipitation, drought indicators, or the 20th century runoff for Europe, multi-century annual runoff reconstructions are still lacking. In this study, we have used reconstructed precipitation and temperature data, Palmer Drought Severity Index and available observed runoff across 14 European catchments in order to develop annual runoff reconstructions for the period 1500–2000 using two data-driven and one conceptual lumped hydrological model. The comparison to observed runoff data has shown a good match between the reconstructed and observed runoff and their characteristics, particularly deficit volumes. On the other hand, the validation of input precipitation fields revealed an underestimation of the variance across most of Europe, which is propagated into the reconstructed runoff series. The reconstructed runoff is available via Figshare, an open-source scientific data repository, under the DOI https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.15178107, (Sadaf et al., 2021).