Publications by Bettina Schaefli

Future water temperature of rivers in Switzerland under climate change investigated with physics-based models

Bettina Schaefli, Michael Lehning, Wolf Hendrik Huwald, Nander Wever, Adrien Michel

River ecosystems are highly sensitive to cli-mate change and projected future increase in air tempera-ture is expected to increase the stress for these ecosystems. Rivers are also an important socio-economic factor impact- ing, amongst others, agriculture, ...

2022

Dataset for: Future water temperature of rivers in Switzerland under climate change investigated with physics-based models

Bettina Schaefli, Michael Lehning, Wolf Hendrik Huwald, Nander Wever, Adrien Michel

This work presents the first extensive study of climate change impacts on rivers temperature in Switzerland. Results show that even for low emissions scenarios, water temperature increase will lead to adverse effect for both ecosystems and socioeconomic se ...

Zenodo2022

Evolution of stream and lake water temperature under climate change

Bettina Schaefli, Alfred Johny Wüest, Damien Bouffard, Wolf Hendrik Huwald, Carl Love Mikael Råman Vinnå, Martin Schmid, Adrien Michel

This report presents past observations and projects the future development of water temperature in Swiss lakes and rivers. Projections are made until the end of the 21st century using the CH2018 climate scenarios. Besides climate change effects on temperat ...

Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN)2021

Stream Temperature Evolution in Switzerland: Recent past and future

Bettina Schaefli, Tristan Jonas Brauchli, Michael Lehning, Wolf Hendrik Huwald, Nander Wever, Adrien Michel

Climate change has already affected many components of our natural environment which are well described in the literature. Water temperature has received less interest despite the fact that it is recognized as key variable for assessing water quality of fr ...

2020

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

Bettina Schaefli, Tristan Jonas Brauchli, Michael Lehning, Wolf Hendrik Huwald, Adrien Michel

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 ...

2020

Estimation spatiale des précipitations et assimilation de données de débit pour la prévision hydrologique en milieu alpin

Giovanni De Cesare, Bettina Schaefli, Anton Schleiss, Javier García Hernández, Alain Tommy Foehn, Andrea Rinaldo

L’étude présentée propose des solutions à certains défis rencontrés dans le cadre du système de prévision et de gestion des crues MINERVE du Canton du Valais, opérationnel depuis 2013. Le premier axe de recherche est dédié à l’interpolation spatiale des pr ...

2020

Estimation of streamflow recession parameters: New insights from an analytic streamflow distribution model

Bettina Schaefli, Andrea Rinaldo, Ana Clara Pereira Barbosa Santos

Streamflow recession analysis characterizes the storage-outflow relationship in catchments. This relationship, which typically follows a power law, summarizes all catchment-scale subsurface hydrological processes and has long been known to be a key descrip ...

2019

Spatial interpolation of precipitation from multiple rain gauge networks and weather radar data for operational applications in Alpine catchments

Giovanni De Cesare, Bettina Schaefli, Javier García Hernández, Alain Tommy Foehn

Increasing meteorological data availability and quality implies an adaptation of the interpolation methods for data combination. In this paper, we propose a new method to efficiently combine weather radar data with data from two heated rain gauge networks ...

2018

The role of glacier retreat for Swiss hydropower production

Bettina Schaefli, Pedro Filipe De Almeida Manso

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 ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2018

Swiss Rainfall Mass Curves and their Influence on Extreme Flood Simulation

Bettina Schaefli, Anton Schleiss, Javier García Hernández, Fränz Zeimetz, Guillaume Mathieu Artigue

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 ...

2018

Analytical flow duration curves for summer streamflow in Switzerland

Bettina Schaefli, Andrea Rinaldo, Ana Clara Pereira Barbosa Santos

Copernicus GmbH2018

Alpine hydropower production and glacier retreat: the case of Switzerland

Bettina Schaefli, Pedro Filipe De Almeida Manso

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 ...

2018

New Approach to Identifying Critical Initial Conditions for Extreme Flood Simulations in a Semicontinuous Simulation Framework

Bettina Schaefli, Anton Schleiss, Javier García Hernández, Fränz Zeimetz, Guillaume Mathieu Artigue

Extreme flood simulation with synthetic extreme precipitation events raises unavoidable questions about the choice of initial conditions. State-of-the-art extreme flood estimation frameworks propose to address these questions with the help of semicontinuou ...

2018

Bayesian spectral likelihood for hydrological parameter inference

Bettina Schaefli

American Geophysical Union2017

Tapping hidden hydropower potential in Swiss Alpine catchments in the context of the planned nuclear power phase out

Bettina Schaefli, Anton Schleiss, Pedro Filipe De Almeida Manso, Ana Clara Pereira Barbosa Santos

In its Energy Strategy 2050, Switzerland is revising its energy perspectives with a strong focus on renewable sources of energy and in particular hydropower. In this context, the Swiss Government funded a number of competence centers for energy research (S ...

2017

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

Bettina Schaefli, Anton Schleiss, Javier García Hernández, Fränz Zeimetz, Guillaume Mathieu Artigue

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 ...

2017

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

Bettina Schaefli

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 ...

Wiley-Blackwell2016

Improving the theoretical underpinnings of process-based hydrologic models

Bettina Schaefli, Serena Ceola

In this Commentary, we argue that it is possible to improve the physical realism of hydrologic models by making better use of existing hydrologic theory. We address the following questions: (1) what are some key elements of current hydrologic theory; (2) h ...

American Geophysical Union2016

Scale-dependent effects of solar radiation patterns on the snow-dominated hydrologic response

Bettina Schaefli, Michael Lehning, Andrea Rinaldo, Francesco Comola, Gianluca Botter, Pierfrancesco Da Ronco, Mathias Thierry Pierre Bavay

Solar radiation is a dominant driver of snowmelt dynamics and streamflow generation in alpine catchments. A better understanding of how solar radiation patterns affect the hydrologic response is needed to assess when calibrated temperature-index models are ...

American Geophysical Union2015

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

Bettina Schaefli, Michael Lehning, Andrea Rinaldo, Francesco Comola

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 ...

American Geophysical Union2015