Climate change: earlier spring discharge in the main Alpine rivers

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Climate shows a natural variability that influences dynamics and trends of river discharges. In particular, intense precipitations would cause floods, while prolonged dry periods are associated to droughts phenomena.
A study recently published on Science of the Total Environment (among the authors, CMCC researchers M. Zampieri, E. Scoccimarro, S. Gualdi, A. Navarra) realized a comparison of long-term spring discharge timings over the Alps while analyzing precipitation and snow-melting data derived from observations.
Results highlighted that the largest rivers such as the Rhine, the Danube, the Rhone and the Po rivers, show similar trends and features of decadal variability. Snow-melt timing explains a portion of the discharge’s decadal variability, while change of precipitation seasonality causes earlier spring discharge.

The abstract of the paper:
In this study, we analyse the observed long-term discharge time-series of the Rhine, the Danube, the Rhone and the Po rivers. These rivers are characterised by different seasonal cycles reflecting the diverse climates and morphologies of the Alpine basins. However, despite the intensive and varied water management adopted in the four basins, we found common features in the trend and low-frequency variability of the spring discharge timings. All the discharge time-series display a tendency towards earlier spring peaks of more than two weeks per century. These results can be explained in terms of snowmelt, total precipitation (i.e. the sum of snowfall and rainfall) and rainfall variability. The relative importance of these factors might be different in each basin. However, we show that the change of seasonality of total precipitation plays a major role in the earlier spring runoff over most of the Alps.

Read the integral version of the paper:
Zampieri M., Scoccimarro E., Gualdi S., Navarra A.
Observed shift towards earlier spring discharge in the main Alpine rivers

2014, Science of the Total Environment, Volumes 503–504, 15 January 2015, Pages 222–232

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