Skip to main content

FRAMES logo
Resource Catalog

Document

Type: Journal Article
Author(s): Berit Arheimer; Göran Lindström
Publication Date: 2019

Changes in river flow may appear from shifts in land cover, constructions in the river channel, and climatic change, but currently there is a lack of understanding of the relative importance of these drivers. Therefore, we collected gauged river‐flow time‐series from 1961 to 2018 from across Sweden for 34 disturbed catchments to quantify how the various types of disturbances have affected river flow. We used trend analysis and the differences in observations versus hydrological modelling to explore the effects on river flow from: (1) land cover changes from wildfires, storms and urbanization; (2) dam constructions with regulations for hydropower production; and (3) climate‐change impact in otherwise undisturbed catchments. A mini model‐ensemble, consisting of three versions of the S‐HYPE model, was used and the three models gave similar results. We searched for changes in annual and daily stream flow, seasonal flow regime and flow duration curves. The results show that regulation of river flow has the largest impact, reducing spring floods with up to 100% and increasing winter flow by several orders of magnitude, with substantial effects transmitted far downstream. Climate changed the total river flow up to 20%. Tree removal by wildfires and storms has minor impacts at medium and large‐scales. Urbanization, on the contrary, showed a 20% increase in high flows also at medium scales. This study emphasizes the benefits of combining observed time‐series with numerical modelling to exclude the effect of varying weather conditions, when quantifying the effects of various drivers on long‐term streamflow shifts.

Online Links
Citation: Arheimer, Berit; Lindström, Göran. 2019. Detecting changes in river flow caused by wildfires, storms, urbanization, regulation and climate across Sweden. Water Resources Research 55(11):8990-9005.

Cataloging Information

Topics:
Regions:
Keywords:
  • accumulated difference
  • empirical models
  • environmental change
  • land cover change
  • model residuals
  • overland flow generation
  • process understanding
  • river flow
  • Sweden
Record Last Modified:
Record Maintained By: FRAMES Staff (https://www.frames.gov/contact)
FRAMES Record Number: 58744