Attribution assessment of hydrological trends and extremes to climate change for Northern high latitude catchments in Norway

Abstract

The northern high latitudes have experienced the strongest warming in the world and substantial changes in streamflow and hydrological extremes. However, there have been limited attribution studies of changes in streamflow and hydrological extremes in this region. This study provides the first trend detection and attribution assessment on 33 hydrological variables for 50 Norwegian catchments in the period 1961–2019, using observed and simulated runoff data from four hydrological models driven by factual (observed) and counterfactual forcing data. Significant increasing trends are detected in observed annual, spring and winter runoff in most catchments and significant trends towards earlier spring floods are found in 40% of catchments. The four hydrological models show similarly good performance in terms of daily discharge in both calibration and validation periods, and they can reproduce 62% of the observed significant trends considering both trend direction and significance. The counterfactual forcing data were generated by the ATTRICI model, which removed all warming trends and most significant trends in precipitation in the factual time series. Ninety-four percent of the simulated significant trends driven by the factual forcing data are insignificant under counterfactual conditions, with trend slopes approaching zero. Thus, based on the model performance in trend reproduction and the difference of significant trends under factual and counterfactual conditions, we conclude that about 58% of the observed significant trends in Norwegian catchments can be attributed mainly to climate change. The comparisons of the historical extreme events under factual and counterfactual conditions show that more than 65% of floods and droughts in the 2010s could have been magnified by climate change.