CCHydro / Klimaänderung und Wasserkraftnutzung (Climate change andhydropower) / Klimaänderung und Wasserkraftnutzung – Sektorielle Studie Wallis (Climate change and hydropower – Sectoral study Valais)

Thomas Bosshard, Dr. Sven Kotlarski

Within these three projects, funded by swisselectric research/BAFU/BFE, the influence of future climate change on several aspects of river discharge is investigated. The IAC Climate and Water Cycle Group is providing the necessary regional climate change information. For this purpose, a methodology is developed to extract the robust part of the mean annual cycle of temperature and precipitation changes from noisy RCM timeseries. The work is based on RCM experiments of the ENSEMBLES project and is integrated into the C2SM (Center for Climate Systems Modeling).

Fig 1: Projected change of mean seasonal precipitation for >600 stations in Switzerland from 1961-1990 until 2021-2050 (mean of 17 RCM integrations, forced by different GCMs and assuming the SRES A1B emission scenario). The gray shading indicates the robustness of the results (dark shading: most models agree in the sign of the precipitation change).