Assessment and Modeling of Snow Melting Impacts in the French Mediterranean Region - Application to the Var catchment, France

The climate change impacts leads to the raise of air temperature, which highly affected on the snow melting process in catchment hydrological system. In catchment water resources management, it gains more interests among local managers and hydrological researchers. In this study, based on the daily discharge (2008-2014) collected at the outlet of Var catchment, which located at French Mediterranean region, two flood periods were first identified during one hydrological year. For the flood occurred at spring time, the runoff produced by snow melting from upstream of the catchment has significant contribution to the flood discharge recorded at downstream. To assess the snow melting impacts in this catchment, a distributed deterministic hydrological model (MIKE SHE) was built to simulate the complex hydrological system in Var catchment from 2011 to 2013 with limited data collection. After calibrating the model with the observed discharge, the simulation of MIKE SHE were able to represent the hydrological process in Var catchment including the snow producing and melting process. The simulation results showed that the hypothesis made for the snow melting process, which not only considered the impacts of raise air temperature but also the sunshine intensity was reasonable and suitable to be applied in French Mediterranean region. The modelling approach described in this study could be beneficial to the assessment of snow melting process in the same region or similar watershed.