ИСТИНА

The ECOMAG and the HYPE regional hydrological models were setup to assess possible impacts of climate changeonthehydrologicalregimeoftwopan-Arcticgreatdrainagebasins:theLenaandtheMackenzierivers.We firstly assessed the reliability of the hydrological models to reproduce the historical streamflow series and analyse the hydrological projections from the climate change scenarios. The impacts were assessed in three 30-year periods: early- (2006-2035), mid- (2036-2065) and end-century (2070-2099) using an ensemble of five GCMs and four Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) scenarios. Results show, particularly, that the basins react with multi-year delay to changes in the RCP2.6 mitigation (peak-and-decline) scenario, and consequently to the potential mitigation measures. Then we assessed the hydrological projections’ uncertainty, which is caused by the GCM’sandRCP’svariabilities,andindicatedthattheuncertaintyriseswiththetimehorizonoftheprojectionand, generally, the uncertainty interval is wider for Mackenzie than for Lena. We finally compare the potential future hydrological impacts predicted based on the GCM-scenario ensemble approach and the delta-change transformation method of the historical observations. We found that the latter method can produce useful information about the climate change impact in the great Arctic rivers, at least for the nearest decades.