Publications by Bettina Schaefli

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High elevation or high latitude hydropower production (HP) strongly relies on water resources that are influenced by glacier melt and are thus highly sensitive to climate warming. Despite of the wide-spread glacier retreat since the development of HP infra ...

The hydrology of high mountainous catchments is often predicted with conceptual precipitation-discharge models that simulate the snow accumulation and ablation behavior of a very complex environment using as only input temperature and precipitation. It is ...

This paper presents a calibration framework for a precipitation-runoff model for flood prediction in a mesoscale Alpine basin with strongly anthropogenic discharges. The developed methodology addresses two classical hydrological calibration challenges: com ...

Extreme floods are commonly estimated with the help of design storms and hydrological models. In this paper, we propose a new method to take into account the relationship between precipitation intensity (P) and air temperature (T) to account for potential ...

Compared to daily rainfall data, observed subdaily rainfall times are rare and often very short. For hydrologic modeling, this problem is often addressed by generating synthetic hourly rainfall series, with rainfall generators calibrated on relevant rainfa ...

Rainfall is poorly modeled by general circulation models (GCMs) and requires appropriate downscaling for local-scale hydrological impact studies. Such downscaling methods should be robust and accurate (to handle, e.g., extreme events and uncertainties), bu ...

This paper presents a spatially-explicit model for hydro-thermal response simulations of Alpine catchments, accounting for advective and non-advective energy fluxes in stream networks characterized by arbitrary degrees of geomorphological complexity. The r ...

We propose a novel analytical description of the streamflow probability distribution functions (pdfs) in Alpine catchments characterized by pronounced, snow-dominated winter low flows. Knowledge about such hydrological regimes is crucial for water resources management in mountain environments and the related wide range of socio-economic, environmental and ecological services. We use a stochastic framework, generalizing that employed by Botter et al. (2007b), to link precipitation (rain and snow) and streamf

Affecting the habitat suitability of many fish species, water temperature is a hydrological factor of great concern in the actual context of climate change. Despite more than 40 years of research on this topic, the impact of landscape on the dynamics of stream temperature is still not entirely understood. In the present study, we analyzed the monthly mean stream temperature measurements collected in 26 medium-sized catchments (3–300 km2) in Switzerland. While selecting the catchments, particular attention w

Soil-atmosphere feedback is a key for understanding the hydrological cycle and the direction of potential system changes. This paper presents an analytical framework to study the interplay between soil and atmospheric moisture, using as input only the boun ...

Hydropower production (HP) in high mountainous areas relies on snow- and glacier melt influenced water resources and is thus highly sensitive to climate warming. Based on the case of Switzerland that produces over 50% of its electricity from hydropower, we ...

Hydrologic prediction in small Alpine catchments (up 50-200km2) plays a crucial role for water and flood man- agement in downstream areas. In this generally steep environments, understanding the relative role of hydrologic processes in the hillslopes and of water transport in the channeled states (the river network) at hourly to daily time scales represents an important step towards building appropriate prediction tools and transferring them to catchments without observations. Here, we present a model-based

Water temperature is a hydrological factor which affects the habitat suitability of many aquatic (fish) species, and is therefore of great concern in the actual context of climate change. Two types of models are currently used to simulate stream temperature: physically-based models, which are typically applied only over limited areas, and regression models, which usually lack the ability to make predictions in ungauged areas. As an attempt to bridge the gap between these two types, we propose a hybrid model

Stream temperature and discharge are key hydro- logical variables for ecosystem and water resource management and are particularly sensitive to climate warming. Despite the wealth of meteorological and hydrological data, few studies have quantified observe ...

Hydropower is a key energy source in almost all world regions. It fuels social and economic development, ensures electricity security, and is a pillar for renewable electricity production. But hydropower and its environmental impacts are vulnerable to clim ...

Discharge simulation from snow-dominated catchments seems to be an easy task. Any spatially explicit precipitation-runoff model coupled to a temperature-index snow model generally yields simulations that mimic well the observed daily discharges. The robust ...

The present work analyzes the climate change impacts on the runoff regimes of mountainous catchments in the Swiss Alps having current glaciation rates between 0 and 50 %. The hydrological response of 11 catchments to a given climate scenario is simulated through a conceptual, reservoir-based precipitation-runoff transformation model called GSM-SOCONT (Schaefli, 2005). For the glacierized catchments, the glacier surface corresponding to this future scenario is updated through a conceptual glacier surface evo

This paper presents the Spatially Explicit Hydrologic Response (SEHR) model developed at the Laboratory of Ecohydrology of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne for the simulation of hydrological processes at the catchment scale. The key concept of ...

Extreme flood estimates for dam safety are routinely obtained from hydrologic simulations driven by selected design storms. The temporal structure of such design storms can be obtained from Rainfall Mass Curves (RMCs), which are adimensionalized curves of ...

Hydrological flood forecasting in mountainous areas requires accurate partitioning between rain and snowfall to properly estimate the extent of runoff contributing areas. Here a method to make use of snowfall limit information-a standard output of limited- ...

Bettina Schaefli

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The role of glacier retreat for Swiss hydropower production

Integrating point glacier mass balance observations into hydrologic model identification

Signature-based model calibration for hydrologic prediction in mesoscale Alpine catchments

Relevance of the correlation between precipitation and the 0 C isothermal altitude for extreme flood estimation

Toward a robust method for subdaily rainfall downscaling from daily data

A robust framework for probabilistic precipitations downscaling from an ensemble of climate predictions applied to Switzerland

Thermodynamics in the hydrologic response: Travel time formulation and application to Alpine catchments

Analytic probability distributions for snow-dominated streamflow

Investigating the Monthly Mean Stream Temperature Dynamics

An analytical model for soil-atmosphere feedback

Alpine hydropower production and glacier retreat: the case of Switzerland

Understanding the relative role of hillslope processes and geomorphology in Alpine catchments

Modeling the monthly mean stream temperature dynamics

Stream temperature and discharge evolution in Switzerland over the last 50 years: annual and seasonal behaviour

Projecting hydropower production under future climates: a guide for decision-makers and modelers to interpret and design climate change impact assessments

Snow hydrology signatures for model identification within a limits-of-acceptability approach

Prediction of climate change impacts on Alpine discharge regimes under A2 and B2 SRES emission scenarios for two future time periods (2020-2049, 2070-2099)

SEHR-ECHO v1.0: a Spatially Explicit Hydrologic Response model for ecohydrologic applications

Swiss Rainfall Mass Curves and their Influence on Extreme Flood Simulation

Snowfall Limit Forecasts and Hydrological Modeling