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    How evaluation of global hydrological models can help to improve credibility of river discharge projections under climate change
    (Dordrecht [u.a.] : Springer Science + Business Media B.V, 2020) Krysanova, Valentina; Zaherpour, Jamal; Didovets, Iulii; Gosling, Simon N.; Gerten, Dieter; Hanasaki, Naota; Müller Schmied, Hannes; Pokhrel, Yadu; Satoh, Yusuke; Tang, Qiuhong; Wada, Yoshihide
    Importance of evaluation of global hydrological models (gHMs) before doing climate impact assessment was underlined in several studies. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the performance of six gHMs in simulating observed discharge for a set of 57 large catchments applying common metrics with thresholds for the monthly and seasonal dynamics and summarize them estimating an aggregated index of model performance for each model in each basin. One model showed a good performance, and other five showed a weak or poor performance in most of the basins. In 15 catchments, evaluation results of all models were poor. The model evaluation was supplemented by climate impact assessment for a subset of 12 representative catchments using (1) usual ensemble mean approach and (2) weighted mean approach based on model performance, and the outcomes were compared. The comparison of impacts in terms of mean monthly and mean annual discharges using two approaches has shown that in four basins, differences were negligible or small, and in eight catchments, differences in mean monthly, mean annual discharge or both were moderate to large. The spreads were notably decreased in most cases when the second method was applied. It can be concluded that for improving credibility of projections, the model evaluation and application of the weighted mean approach could be recommended, especially if the mean monthly (seasonal) impacts are of interest, whereas the ensemble mean approach could be applied for projecting the mean annual changes. The calibration of gHMs could improve their performance and, consequently, the credibility of projections. © 2020, The Author(s).
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    Performance evaluation of global hydrological models in six large Pan-Arctic watersheds
    (Dordrecht [u.a.] : Springer Science + Business Media B.V, 2020) Gädeke, Anne; Krysanova, Valentina; Aryal, Aashutosh; Chang, Jinfeng; Grillakis, Manolis; Hanasaki, Naota; Koutroulis, Aristeidis; Pokhrel, Yadu; Satoh, Yusuke; Schaphoff, Sibyll; Müller Schmied, Hannes; Stacke, Tobias; Tang, Qiuhong; Wada, Yoshihide; Thonicke, Kirsten
    Global Water Models (GWMs), which include Global Hydrological, Land Surface, and Dynamic Global Vegetation Models, present valuable tools for quantifying climate change impacts on hydrological processes in the data scarce high latitudes. Here we performed a systematic model performance evaluation in six major Pan-Arctic watersheds for different hydrological indicators (monthly and seasonal discharge, extremes, trends (or lack of), and snow water equivalent (SWE)) via a novel Aggregated Performance Index (API) that is based on commonly used statistical evaluation metrics. The machine learning Boruta feature selection algorithm was used to evaluate the explanatory power of the API attributes. Our results show that the majority of the nine GWMs included in the study exhibit considerable difficulties in realistically representing Pan-Arctic hydrological processes. Average APIdischarge (monthly and seasonal discharge) over nine GWMs is > 50% only in the Kolyma basin (55%), as low as 30% in the Yukon basin and averaged over all watersheds APIdischarge is 43%. WATERGAP2 and MATSIRO present the highest (APIdischarge > 55%) while ORCHIDEE and JULES-W1 the lowest (APIdischarge ≤ 25%) performing GWMs over all watersheds. For the high and low flows, average APIextreme is 35% and 26%, respectively, and over six GWMs APISWE is 57%. The Boruta algorithm suggests that using different observation-based climate data sets does not influence the total score of the APIs in all watersheds. Ultimately, only satisfactory to good performing GWMs that effectively represent cold-region hydrological processes (including snow-related processes, permafrost) should be included in multi-model climate change impact assessments in Pan-Arctic watersheds. © 2020, The Author(s).
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    How evaluation of hydrological models influences results of climate impact assessment—an editorial
    (Dordrecht [u.a.] : Springer Science + Business Media B.V, 2020) Krysanova, Valentina; Hattermann, Fred F.; Kundzewicz, Zbigniew W.
    This paper introduces the Special Issue (SI) “How evaluation of hydrological models influences results of climate impact assessment.” The main objectives were as follows: (a) to test a comprehensive model calibration/validation procedure, consisting of five steps, for regional-scale hydrological models; (b) to evaluate performance of global-scale hydrological models; and (c) to reveal whether the calibration/validation methods and the model evaluation results influence climate impacts in terms of the magnitude of the change signal and the uncertainty range. Here, we shortly describe the river basins and large regions used as case studies; the hydrological models, data, and climate scenarios used in the studies; and the applied approaches for model evaluation and for analysis of projections for the future. After that, we summarize the main findings. The following general conclusions could be drawn. After successful comprehensive calibration and validation, the regional-scale models are more robust and their projections for the future differ from those of the model versions after the conventional calibration and validation. Therefore, climate impacts based on the former models are more trustworthy than those simulated by the latter models. Regarding the global-scale models, using only models with satisfactory or good performance on historical data and weighting them based on model evaluation results is a more reliable approach for impact assessment compared to the ensemble mean approach that is commonly used. The former method provides impact results with higher credibility and reduced spreads in comparison to the latter approach. The studies for this SI were performed in the framework of the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP). © 2020, The Author(s).