Evolution of flood generating processes under climate change in France

Abstract. The impact of climate change on floods varies spatially, and often the observed trends in flood characteristics can be explained by differentiated changes in flood-generating processes. This study explores changes in flood magnitude and flood-generating processes under different climate change scenarios for a large number of basins in France. It is based on an unprecedented exercise to model the impacts of climate change on hydrology, using a semi-distributed model (GRSD) applied to 3727 basins with 22 Euro-CORDEX bias-corrected climate projections using two greenhouse gas emission scenarios (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5). Annual maxima of daily simulated streamflow were extracted for the period 1975–2100, resulting in a set of over 10 million flood events, and a trend analysis was carried out on both flood magnitudes and flood generating processes. The trends in flood magnitude are contrasted, with increasing trends only in the northern regions of France, although multi-model convergence rarely exceeds 60 %. The highest increases are observed for the rarest floods and under the RCP8.5 scenario. A classification of floods according to their generating process revealed that floods linked to soil saturation represent more than half of all floods in France. The relative change in the importance of the different flood-generating processes is not spatially homogeneous and varies by region. The proportion of floods linked to soil saturation excess is decreasing while the proportion of floods linked to infiltration excess related to extreme rainfall is increasing, particularly in the southern Mediterranean regions. Both the frequency and magnitude of floods linked to snowmelt processes are decreasing in mountainous areas. On the contrary, the most extreme floods associated with rainfall on dry soils tend to increase, in line with the increase of rainfall intensity. Overall, trends in antecedent soil moisture conditions are as important as trends in intense rainfall to explain flood hazard trends in the different climate projections. This study shows how important it is to decipher the changes in the different flood generating processes in order to better understand their evolution in different hydroclimatic regions.