Collignan et al. (2025) Identifying and Quantifying the Impact of Climatic and Non‐Climatic Drivers on River Discharge in Europe

⚠️ Warning: This summary was generated from the abstract only, as the full text was not available.

Identification

• Journal: Water Resources Research
• Year: 2025
• Authors: Julie Collignan, Jan Polcher‬, Sophie Bastin, Pere Quintana Seguí
• DOI: 10.1029/2024wr038220

Research Groups

Not specified in the abstract.

Short Summary

This study proposes a novel methodology utilizing a common parsimonious modeling framework to decompose observed river discharge trends into components driven by climate change and those driven by non-climatic (human) factors across Europe, concluding that non-climatic factors dominate discharge changes, particularly in Southern Europe.

Objective

• To propose a methodology to compare discharge observations to discharge from a physically based model using a common interpretation framework, allowing for the isolation of trends in catchment dynamics caused by non-modeled factors (e.g., human intervention) from trends caused by evolving climate dynamics.

Study Configuration

• Spatial Scale: Continental (Europe), analyzing regional differences between Northern and Southern catchments.
• Temporal Scale: Long-term analysis covering changes over the last century.

Methodology and Data

• Models used: A physically based hydrological model (serving as the climate-only reference system) and a parsimonious interpretation model (serving as the common framework for comparison).
• Data sources: Discharge observations (compared against model outputs).

Main Results

• Over Europe, non-climatic factors are the dominant explanation for observed discharge trends, especially in the South.
• Non-climatic factors are hypothesized to be primarily irrigation development, groundwater pumping, and other human water usage.
• In certain catchments of Northern Europe, climate change appears to be the dominating driver of discharge change.

Contributions

• Introduction of a novel methodology that uses a common parsimonious interpretation framework to robustly separate the effects of climate change from non-modeled factors (human intervention) on catchment dynamics, even when the physically based model exhibits systematic biases.
• Providing evidence that non-climatic factors are the primary drivers of historical discharge trends in large parts of Europe, underscoring the necessity of including these factors in future physically based modeling efforts.

Funding

Not specified in the abstract.

Citation

@article{Collignan2025Identifying,
  author = {Collignan, Julie and Polcher‬, Jan and Bastin, Sophie and Quintana‐Seguí, Pere},
  title = {Identifying and Quantifying the Impact of Climatic and Non‐Climatic Drivers on River Discharge in Europe},
  journal = {Water Resources Research},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.1029/2024wr038220},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1029/2024wr038220}
}

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