Hydrologic analysis of climate change scenarios in Spain

In order to evaluate the impact of climate change in water resources it is important to know whether the simulations of climate models are representative of the observed hydrologic characteristics, as well as determine how are the variations of the different hydrometeorological variables under climate change scenarios. This study analyzes the behavior of the main variables involved in the hydrological cycle: precipitation, temperature, evaporation and runoff, in current situation or control scenario (1961-1990) and climate change scenario A2 (2071-2100) under different climate projections from the PRUDENCE European project. The analysis is performed in the basins that cover the whole territory of mainland Spain. The results highlight a negative bias in the runoff simulated by climate models with respect to the observed values estimated by the hydrological model SIMPA. The climate projections show an increase in mean temperature and a decrease in precipitation, evaporation and runoff and also projecting an increase in the coefficient of variation. Temperature and precipitation variables show more similar and homogeneous results, variable evaporation shows some heterogeneity and the variable runoff shows greater dispersion in the results.