A Framework to Quantify the Uncertainty Contribution of GCMs Over Multiple Sources in Hydrological Impacts of Climate Change.

The quantification of climate change impacts on hydrology is subjected to multiple uncertainty sources. Large ensembles of hydrological simulations based on multimodel ensembles (MMEs) have been commonly applied to represent overall uncertainty of hydrological impacts. However, as increasing numbers of global climate models (GCMs) are being developed, how many GCMs in MMEs are sufficient to characterize overall uncertainty is not clear. Therefore, this study investigates the influences of GCM quantity on quantifying overall uncertainty and uncertainty contributions of multiple sources in hydrological impacts. Large ensembles of hydrological simulations are obtained through the permutation of 3 greenhouse gas emission scenarios, 22 GCMs, 6 downscaling techniques, 5 hydrological models (HMs), and 5 sets of HM parameters, which enables to decompose uncertainty components using analysis of variance. The influences of GCM quantity are investigated by repeatedly conducting uncertainty decomposition for hydrological simulations from subsets with different numbers of GCMs. The results show that GCMs are the leading uncertainty sources in evaluating changes in annual and peak streamflows, while for changes in low flow, other uncertainty sources except HM parameters also have large contributions to overall uncertainty. Furthermore, on the condition of using no more than five GCMs, there are large possibilities that the overall uncertainty and GCMs' uncertainty contribution are underestimated. Using around 10 GCMs can ensure that the median of different combinations generates similar uncertainty components as the whole ensemble. Therefore, it is recommended to use at least 10 GCMs in studies of climate change impacts on hydrology to thoroughly quantify uncertainty. Plain Language Summary: Simulating hydrological responses to climate change involves multiple steps, which contribute uncertainty. Although climate model simulations are often found to be one of the major sources of uncertainty, how many simulations are needed to thoroughly estimate the uncertainty of hydrological responses is still not clear. Facing the growing number of climate simulations, using all of them will also pose a large computational burden in studying hydrological impacts of climate change. Therefore, we proposed a framework to evaluate how the numbers of climate simulations affect the quantification of uncertainty. Our results show that using insufficient numbers of global climate models leads to the underestimation of uncertainty. It is recommended to use at least 10 global climate models to adequately consider the uncertainty resulting from climate models. Our findings are helpful in the selection of sufficient climate simulations in simulating hydrological responses under climate change. Key Points: A framework to quantify the uncertainty contribution of GCMs over multiple sources in hydrological impacts of climate change is proposedUsing an insufficient number of GCMs may result in the underestimation of overall uncertainty and GCMs' contribution to uncertaintyIt is recommended to use at least 10 GCMs in studies of hydrological climate change impacts to thoroughly quantify uncertainty [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]