Our water resources have changed over the last century through a combination of water management evolutions and climate change. Understanding and decomposing these drivers of discharge changes is essential to preparing and planning adaptive strategies. We propose a methodology combining a physical-based model to reproduce the natural behavior of river catchments and a parsimonious model to serve as a framework of interpretation, comparing the physical-based model outputs to observations of discharge trends. We show that over Europe, especially in the South, the dominant explanations for discharge trends are non-climatic factors. Still, in some catchments of Northern Europe, climate change seems to be the dominating driver of change. We hypothesize that the dominating non-climatic factors are irrigation development, groundwater pumping and other human water usage, which need to be taken into account in physical-based models to understand the main drivers of discharge and project future changes.

In a context of climate change, the stakes surrounding water availability are getting higher. Decomposing and quantifying the effects of climate on discharge allows to better understand their impact on water resources. We propose a methodology to separate the effect of change in annual mean of climate variables from the effect of intra-annual distribution of precipitations. It combines the Budyko framework with outputs from a Land Surface Model (LSM). The LSM is used to reproduces the behavior of 2134 reconstructed watersheds over Europe between 1902 and 2010, with climate inputs as the only source of change. We fit to the LSM outputs a one parameter approximation to the Budyko framework. It accounts for the evolution of annual mean in precipitation (P) and potential evapotranspiration (PET). We introduce a time-varying parameter in the equation which represents the effect of long-term variations in the intra-annual distribution of P and PET. To better assess the effects of changes in annual means or in intra-annual distribution of P, we construct synthetic forcings fixing one or the other. The results over Europe show that the changes in discharge due to climate are dominated by the trends in the annual averages of P. The second main climate driver is PET, except over the Mediterranean area where changes in intra-annual variations of P have a higher impact on discharge than trends in PET. Therefore the effects of changes in intra-annual distribution of climate variables are not to be neglected when looking at changes in annual discharge.