Identification

Title

Robustness of hydroclimate metrics for climate change impact research

Abstract

Metrics based on streamflow and/or climate variables are used in water management for monitoring and evaluating available resources. To reflect future change in the hydrological regime, metrics are estimated using climate change information from Global Climate Models or from stochastic time series representing future climates. Whilst often simple to calculate, many metrics implicitly represent complex physical process. We evaluate the scientific validity of metrics used in a climate change context, demonstrating their use to reflect aspects of timing, magnitude, extreme values, variability, duration, state, system services, and performance. We raise awareness about the following generic issues (a) formulation: metrics often assume stationarity of the input data, which is invalid under climate change; and do not always consider potential changes to seasonality and the relevance of the temporal window used for analysis; (b) climate change input data: how well are the physical processes relevant to the metric represented in the climate change input data; what is the impact of bias correction on relevant spatial and temporal scale dependencies and relevant intervariable dependencies; how realistic are the data in representing sequencing of events and natural variability in large-scale ocean-atmosphere systems; and (c) decision-making context: are rules and values that frame the decision-making process likely to remain constant or change in a future world. If critical climate or hydrological processes are not well represented by the metric constituents, these indices can be misleading about plausible future change. However, knowledge of how to construct a robust metric can safeguard against misleading interpretations about future change.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d74b344d

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2018-07-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact