Development and testing of methods to assess the impact of climate change on flood and drought hazards at the European scale

The Joint research centre aims to develop knowledge and tools in support of the EU climate change strategy. In view of this, an important research topic of the Land management unit of the IES is to assess the impact of climate change on the occurrence of hydrological extremes such as floods and droughts. This requires an integrated approach that couples simulations of the current climate and of the future climate for different scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the 21st century with a hydrological model. An integrated modelling framework is currently being developed and tested at the weather driven natural hazards group of the land management unit to translate regional climate change signals into changes in hydrological hazards. The framework combines detailed regional climate predictions for Europe with a physically-based spatially distributed rainfall-runoff model. This document provides an outline of the procedure, as well as an up-to-date overview of techniques for downscaling climate information to the appropriate scale for hydrological impact assessment. Initial results are presented for a pilot study in the Meuse basin.