1. LIQUIDICE webinar

Description: Declining seasonal snow cover is among the most visible consequences of climate change. Yet there remains a limited understanding of how snowpack transformation translates into basin-scale hydrological responses and impacts relevant for water management. Process-based runoff events identification and genetic classification has revealed two key structural changes in Norway rivers’ runoff associated with cryosphere change: (1) a reduction in the volume of the spring snowmelt flood and (2) an intensification of winter thawing processes. As many Norwegian hydropower reservoirs were designed to capture spring snowmelt and release water during winter, these shifts imply increasing mismatch between inflow seasonality and existing regulation strategies. Possible operational tensions include reduced spring refill reliability, higher winter spill risk, or changing flood-control constraints. The observed trends therefore highlight a need to adapt reservoir operations to the likely continued redistribution of runoff from spring toward winter.

Ekaterina Rets is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Geophysics of the Polish Academy of Sciences. For more than 16 years she has been studying how changing climate affects hydrological systems from glaciers and snow to rivers. She has vast fieldwork experience in glacier regions around the world, including Svalbard, Caucasus, Tien Shan, Siberia, Altay, and Kamchatka. She developed the distributed energy-balance model A-Melt for alpine snow and ice melt and co-developed the widely used grwat R-package. Ekaterina is also a contributing author to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report and has been recognized for her work in data science and hydrology.