Journal Pre-proof

Is there a coherence in observed and projected changes in riverine

low flow indices across Central Europe?

Mikołaj Piniewski, Mohammad Reza Eini, Somsubhra

Chattopadhyay, Tomasz Okruszko, Zbigniew W. Kundzewicz

PII: S0012-8252(22)00271-9
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2022.104187
Reference: EARTH 104187

To appear in: Earth-Science Reviews

Received date: 13 June 2022

Revised date: 10 August 2022
Accepted date: 7 September 2022

Please cite this article as: M. Piniewski, M.R. Eini, S. Chattopadhyay, et al., Is there a
coherence in observed and projected changes in riverine low flow indices across Central
Europe?, Earth-Science Reviews (2022), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2022.104187

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Is there a coherence in observed and projected changes in riverine low flow indices across Central

Europe?

Mikołaj Piniewski1,*, Mohammad Reza Eini1, Somsubhra Chattopadhyay1, Tomasz Okruszko1, Zbigniew W.

Kundzewicz2

1
Warsaw University of Life Sciences - SGGW, Department of Hydrology, Meteorology and Water

Management, Warsaw, Poland;

2
Poznań University of Life Sciences, Department of Environmental Engineering and Mechanical

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Engineering, Poznań, Poland;

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*
Corresponding author email mikolaj_piniewski@sggw.edu.pl
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Abstract

Central Europe, a region composed of Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and
Slovenia, occupying over 1 million km2 and inhabited by more than 150 million people, has recently
experienced several extensive and severe hydrological droughts (e.g., 2015, 2018, 2019) that affected a
wide range of sectors. These drought events were broadly attributed to climate change, but often without,
or with only limited, scientific assessment. There is a common belief that warmer climate and more
frequent heat waves are likely to lead to more severe hydrological droughts in the future. However, there is
lack of robust findings that would hold at either national or regional scale, so that comparison of these
findings is of broad relevance and interest in the region. This systematic-style review attempts to identify
the evidence for: (1) historical trends in observed data and (2) changes in model-based projections for the
future, in low river flow and hydrological drought indices in rivers of Central Europe. In the context of this
review, focusing on directions rather than magnitude of historical and future changes, we were treating
hydrological droughts and low flows as synonyms. To address these questions, we searched Web of Science
and Scopus databases and screened 976 abstracts to identify 68 articles fulfilling all inclusion criteria from

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which metadata were extracted and analysed. The results show that overall, trends detected in observation
records have more frequently downward (i.e. meaning decreased low flows or increased drought hazard)
than upward direction (53% vs. 11%). However, the frequency of evidence reporting decreases in future

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low flows is lower for future projections than for historical trends (43% vs. 53%), and even more
convincingly, nearly three times more evidence items point out at upward trends in the future (31% vs.
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11%). This shows that there is a low coherence between observed and projected indices of low river flows
in Central Europe. Catchment topography appears to be an important factor affecting trend direction: in
mountainous catchments only 33% of evidence items pointed out at increasing hydrological drought
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hazard, whereas in other types of catchments this frequency was almost doubled. A striking difference in
dominant future direction of changes between studies based on SRES and RCP scenarios was identified: in
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the former only 6% of evidence items pointed out at less severe hydrological drought hazard in the future,
while in the latter it was 42%. Finally, systematic review approach enabled us to identify some knowledge
gaps, such as studies on low flow trends in lowland and upland catchments as well as in large river basins.
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Keywords streamflow drought; low flows; climate projections; trend detection; hydrological modelling
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1. Introduction

Central Europe (CE) has recently experienced several extensive and severe droughts that affected various

sectors such as agriculture, energy production and water management. In several years (e.g., 2015, 2018,

2019) abnormally low water levels and river flows were often accompanied by abnormally high water

temperatures. In August 2015, about 1600 large companies in Poland suffered restrictions of electric power

supply, due to problems with cooling of their power supply plants, whereas hundreds of towns across the

CE region faced drinking water supply shortages (van Lanen et al., 2016). Exceedances (down-crossings) of

the dissolved oxygen concentration threshold in rivers occurred in southern Germany (Laaha et al., 2017).

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Three years later, freight vessels and cruise ships operating on the River Danube were forced to stop their

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operation when water levels dropped in many sections of the river from Germany down to Hungary. The

2018 drought also led to decrease of hydropower, nuclear power and industrial production as well as high
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fish and macroinvertebrate mortality in different parts of Germany (Erfurt et al., 2019; Hoess and Geist,
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2020). Land ecosystem response to drought was stronger in 2018 than in 2003 which was long considered
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the most extreme compound heat and drought event in Europe over the last century (Buras et al., 2020). In

June 2019, over 350 municipalities in Poland announced restrictions on the use of drinking water and the
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town of Skierniewice (nearly 50 thousand inhabitants) in the vicinity of Warsaw had to cut municipal water
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supply in some districts (Karaczun, 2020). Finally, in 2020 a rather unusual drought occurred in early spring

in Poland contributing to a wildfire that affected over 5,000 ha of the Biebrza National Park protecting
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pristine wetlands (Pińskwar et al., 2020).

All these drought-related impacts were widely reported by the media in CE countries. Indeed, short-term

weather abnormalities tend to influence the media coverage and public opinion more than gradual climate

changes (Pianta and Sisco, 2020). Drying rivers or lakes have become one of the visual signs of the climate

change media coverage (see e.g. https://www.wirtualnemedia.pl/jedynki/newsweek/2019-07-01). There is

a certain tendency in the media to attribute extreme events to climate change even if there is no scientific

basis in the form of a rigorous trend attribution or extreme event attribution study. Actually, water

management or land-use change may be equally important factors to consider. The former may influence

the occurrence of hydrological droughts in both directions: alleviate them downstream thanks to
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engineering infrastructure and aggravate due to water abstraction and irrigation (Kreibich et al., 2019).

Globally, numerous studies pointed out land-use change as another factor aggravating hydrological

droughts (Muhammad et al., 2020; Qi et al., 2020; Roodari et al., 2021). A recent example from 2011-2017

California drought for which 11 prominent extreme event attribution studies were published shows that

there was no overall consensus on the role of climate change in the likelihood or intensity of this event

(Osaka et al., 2020).

Has frequency and severity of extremely low river flows been on the rise in Central Europe? There are only

a few scientific publications that explore this subject using the data including two most recent drought

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years, 2018 and 2019. Hari et al. (2020) demonstrated that the 2018-2019 Central European

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(meteorological) drought was unprecedented in the last 250 years and this type of sequence of consecutive

drought years is projected to become much more frequent under the highest Representative Concentration
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Pathway (RCP 8.5) scenario. A clear decrease in Standardized Precipitation-Evaporation Index (SPEI) in
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1949-2018 was detected in most of spring and summer months in Czech Republic, Romania, Moldova and
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southern Poland (Jaagus et al., 2021). Focusing on studies on hydrological droughts and low river flows,

there exists some evidence that even if the years 2018 and 2019 are not counted, a decreasing trend in low
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discharges can be detected. Piniewski et al. (2018) showed that majority of gauging stations with semi-
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natural flow regime in the northern part of Poland experienced a downward trend in the annual minima of

7-day averaged daily flows in the period 1981-2016. According to Hellwig (2018), who analyzed a large
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sample of small German catchments with long time series of streamflow data, catchments with short

response times were found to have a high probability for a decrease in baseflow minima. Laaha (2016)

reported significant increasing trends in Alpine region of Austria, but decreasing trends in all remaining

parts of the country. Less conclusive was trend detection for low flows in Czech Republic, where significant

changes could not be detected at most gauges (Ledvinka, 2015).

Global climate change, as projected by state-of-the-art General Circulation Models, a.k.a. Global Climate

Models (GCMs) and Regional Climate Models (RCMs), is expected to manifest itself in this region by

increased air temperature, altered seasonal distribution of precipitation as well as more frequent and more

intense extreme weather events (Jacob et al., 2014). There is a common belief that warmer climate and
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more frequent heat waves are likely to inevitably lead to more severe and extensive hydrological droughts

in the future. This conviction is at least partly a result of a simple extrapolation of existing trends, but the

climate impact on freshwater cycle is too complex to be convincingly mimicked by extrapolation. A

plausible approximation of future hydrological conditions can be obtained by forcing hydrological models

(HMs) or land surface models (LSMs) with ensembles of simulations from GCMs or RCMs. A number of

recent model-based climate change impact studies focusing on low flow or hydrological drought indices

reported that commonly expected ‘drying’ scenario does not necessarily have to hold true in Central

Europe. For example, pan-European modelling efforts using two disjoint ensembles of hydrological models

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(Marx et al., 2018; Roudier, 2016) provided no evidence of increased low flow hazard under future climate.

Similar conclusions were also drawn from studies by Piniewski et al. (2017) and Osuch et al. (2018) for

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catchments of various sizes in Poland and by Fangmann (2019) for catchments in the Lower Saxony federal
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state of Germany.
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Against this background, there is a need for a more systematic assessment of historical and future changes
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in hydrological droughts and low river flows in Central Europe. Particular source items of the recent

scientific literature on changes in drought indices in the region do not agree on change direction in general
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as well as between results for change detection in the observed data vs in the model-based projections.
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There is lack of robust findings that would hold at either national or regional scale, so that comparison of

these findings is of broad relevance and interest in the region. Hence, the objective of the present paper is
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to review the results of existing studies of low flows and hydrological droughts in rivers of Central Europe as

reported in scientific literature. More specifically, we ask the following two questions: (1) What is the

evidence for trends in observed low river flow and hydrological drought indices in rivers of Central Europe?

(2) What is the evidence for future changes in low flow and hydrological drought indices in rivers of Central

Europe determined by model-based projections? Synthesis of the responses to both questions will help

answer the question posed in the title: Is there a coherence between observed and projected indices of low

flows in Central Europe?

In order to render the review more objective and transparent than more traditional, narrative reviews, that

are known to be susceptible to bias, we followed the guidelines of Haddaway et al. (2015) and conducted a
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systematic-style review. The main principles from systematic reviews that we incorporated in our review

were: (1) a clear question formulation; (2) systematic literature search using multiple databases with a pre-

defined search strategy (with a focus of not missing any important articles), (3) screening for eligibility using

a clear set of predefined inclusion criteria, (4) evidence base described as a whole and avoiding subjective

weighting of studies.

By definition adopted in this study from van Loon (2015), hydrological drought denotes a deficit of water in

the hydrological system manifested by abnormally low streamflow in rivers (and abnormally low levels in

lakes, reservoirs, and groundwater, but this is not considered here). Classical drought propagation works

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(e.g. Changnon, 1987) define meteorological drought as a period with precipitation deficits that is typically

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followed by a period of abnormally low storage of water in soils denoted as soil moisture or agricultural

drought. In consequence, recharge to groundwater aquifers may become lower, which in turn leads to
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decreased baseflow, the main pathway of streamflow in dry conditions.
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What really matters in this review, are quantitative characteristics, also called metrics or indices, of
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hydrological drought or low flow. We are searching for studies that provide tangible results on historical,

observation-based, or future, model-based directions of changes in such metrics in Central Europe.

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Tallaksen and van Lanen (2004) distinguished three basic groups of hydrological drought metrics: annual
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minimum flows, low flow percentiles and deficit characteristics (e.g. volume, duration). Besides, there are
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baseflow indices, probability-based indices, derived by low flow frequency analysis, and standardized

indices, i.e. successors of the famous standardized precipitation index, SPI. Although some authors point

out that hydrological droughts should not be confused with low flows, since not all low flow periods

constitute a drought (Smakhtin, 2001), in the context of this review these slight terminological differences

may be put aside. Indeed, even though the terms “low flows” and “hydrological droughts” or “streamflow

droughts” are not synonymous, they are often used interchangeably or jointly (one next to the other) in

scientific literature (Bard et al., 2015; Bormann and Pinter, 2017; Forzieri et al., 2014; Roudier et al., 2016).

Close relationships have been found between various indices in drought and low flow literature (Brunner et

al., 2021; Smakhtin, 2001; Tallaksen and Van Lanen, 2004). Thus, it seems highly unlikely that changes in a

certain low flow metrics would have an opposite direction to changes in a hydrological drought metric for a
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given watershed or region. This, in our view, justifies the approach of treating these terms as if they were

nearly synonyms.

2. Central Europe

There does not exist any widely accepted definition of Central Europe, CE (Magocsi, 2018), although the

region is believed to share a common historical, cultural and social identity. For the purpose of this review

we defined CE, somewhat subjectively, as the ensemble of seven countries: Austria, Czech Republic,

Germany, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia (Fig. 1). This is essentially consistent with the World

Factbook1 definition (that includes also Switzerland) and with the EU Interreg Central Europe Programme

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(that omits Switzerland and western Germany but includes Croatia and northern Italy). Importantly,

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according to all these sources, the notion of CE includes only current EU member states.
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Occupying over 1 million km2 and inhabited by more than 150 million people, CE region lies mostly in the
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central part of continental biogeographical region, although it also includes parts of Pannonian, Alpine and

Atlantic regions. Economically, it is characterized by a strong West-East divide in development and strong
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intra-state disparities between urban and rural areas (Grübler, 2020). Five largest, international, river
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basins in EU: the Danube, the Vistula, the Rhine, the Elbe and the Oder are, at least partly (as the Danube

and the Rhine) located in the CE region. Due to historical and socio-economic differences and despite
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common EU water policy, water management largely varies across the CE countries. According to FAO
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Aquastat, the renewable internal freshwater resources per capita range between 612 m3 (Hungary) and

9035 m3 (Slovenia). Regarding climate change, the CE region seems to be less impacted than its southern

neighbor, the Mediterranean region. According to the 6th Assessment Report of the IPCC, the Western and

Central Europe region (partly overlapping with our definition of Central Europe) can expect “projected

increases in hydrological, agricultural and ecological droughts at mid-century warming levels of 2°C or

above, regardless of the greenhouse gas emissions scenario (medium confidence)” (IPCC, 2021). In the IPCC

language medium confidence means around 50% chance of the statement being true, hence it conveys a

considerable uncertainty.

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https://web.archive.org/web/20110524151212/https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-
factbook/fields/2144.html
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Figure 1 Map of Central Europe (CE), as defined in this study. Climate zones are based on the Köppen-

Geiger updated classification (Beck et al., 2018).

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While the time interval between July and October is the most frequent low flow period in the predominant

lowland and upland part of Central Europe, in the Alpine region spanning through southern Germany,

Slovenia and Austria typical low flow period is January-February (Floriancic et al., 2021). Following the

hydrological drought typology of van Loon and van Lanen (2012), rainfall deficit droughts occurring

frequently in summer and fall seasons are most frequent in Central Europe. Indeed, two most severe

hydrological droughts in recent decades (2003 and 2015) that covered all seven countries considered in this

review were typical rainfall-deficit droughts (Laaha et al., 2017). However, in the Alpine region other types

of droughts such as glaciermelt or snowmelt droughts are also frequent (van Loon et al., 2015).

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Defining the spatial domain in this review by administrative boundaries instead of physiographic, climatic or

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river basin units may seem controversial, but such an approach is the most practical one in database

search, as the country names are typically used in title/abstract/keyword sections. River basins would be
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the most natural choice, but the size of the Danube basin poses a problem, since its large part does not
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belong to Central Europe, so its full inclusion would blur the results. In addition, there is no commonly used
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map of physiographic regions of Europe. As regards the climate zones, more than 80% of Central Europe is

located within the Dfb zone (temperate continental climate, Fig. 1).
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3. Materials and Methods

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The following review steps have been executed:

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(i) Search string development

(ii) Article search in Web of Science and Scopus data bases

(iii) Download of references and duplicate removal

(iv) Title and abstract screening

(v) Full text retrieval

(vi) Full text screening and coding

(vii) Synthesis
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Database searches were conducted in February and March 2021. Search string development was iterative

and the goal was to capture all articles of a priori known relevance for both study subjects. The following

keyword string was used in the Web of Science search:

TS2 = (( "low flow*" OR "low discharge*" OR "drought*" OR "minimum

flow*" OR “baseflow” OR “deficit*” OR “low runoff”)

AND

( “river*” OR “catchment* “ OR “ watershed* “ OR “basin*” OR “stream*” OR “gauge*” )

AND

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( “trend*” OR “project*” OR "climat* change" OR "changing climate" OR "future" OR “warming” OR

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"projection*" OR "hydrologic* model*" OR "land surface model*")

AND
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(“poland” OR “polish” OR “slovak*” OR “czech* “ OR “german* “ OR “austria*” OR “slovenia*” OR
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“hungar*” OR "europe*"))
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It was aimed to capture papers dealing with both observations and projections. The string was later

adapted for the Scopus search. We included papers published from 2010 onwards in order to capture all
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possible studies based on the new generation of emission scenarios called Representative Concentration
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Pathways (RCPs; (Moss et al., 2010)). Still, numerous papers published in the analyzed period were based
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on an older generation of emission scenarios, SRES (IPCC, 2000).

Title and abstract screening of de-duplicated references was performed in Endnote. Upon screening,

included articles were divided between two subsets denoted HO (historical observations) and FP (future

projections). This terminology is used hereafter in the article. In rare cases one article could be relevant for

both research questions. Two separate sets of inclusion criteria, applied both at title/abstract and full text

screening phase, were defined for HO and FP studies (Table 1). Seven types of indices related to low flows

and hydrological droughts were specified. The review papers were excluded from the main review, because

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TS = Topic
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they do not typically include raw data like the original research papers that were necessary for this review.

However, they were used for snowballing of references and kept for general discussion.

Table 1 Inclusion criteria in this review.

Category Historical observations (HO) Future projections (FP)

Topic Including results of historical trends in low Including results of model-based future
flow or hydrological drought indices projections on low flow or hydrological drought
indices
Index Presence of commonly-used low flow and hydrological drought indices in one of seven types:
(1) annual flow minima; (2) annual flow percentiles; (3) drought volume deficits; (4) drought

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duration; (5) baseflow indices; (6) standardized drought indices; (7) probability-based indices.

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Location Poland, Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Slovenia, Hungary
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Exclusion Studies on meteorological, agricultural and groundwater droughts
Studies not dealing with rivers or streams (e.g. water levels in oxbows)
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Studies focusing on monthly flows/seasonality
Studies on drought impacts on different sectors
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Review papers (included for snowballing of references)

Studies not performing formal trend Studies not using hydrological or land surface
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analysis (only reporting temporal models to quantify projections

variability)
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Studies with time series of less than 30

years length
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Studies analyzing individual drought events

Bibliographic searches were made only in English, since conducting them in all relevant local languages was

beyond our capacity. In medicine, which has a much longer history of systematic review applications, the

effect of excluding non-English publications from systematic review on its conclusion was assessed as

negligible (Dobrescu et al., 2021, Morisson et al., 2012, Nussbaumer-Streit et al., 2020). In order to

estimate this effect we performed an additional search and a mini-review in the Polish language. To this

end we used Google Scholar search engine and applied the same inclusion criteria as for the main review

(Table 1).
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There are many elements of the statement of the problem that differ in various recent scientific papers on

low river flows (also hydrological droughts) that have been reviewed here. Papers on change detection in

observation records differ with respect to the spatial extent (geographical region covered, with its

characteristics, river basins of various sizes, topography), start-year and end-year of analysis (which may

largely influence the result) and hypothesis testing routines. Papers on change analysis in model-based

projections differ with respect to the spatial extent (as for observations), reference time period and future

time horizon, as well as information on climate models (GCMs and RCMs), emission scenarios (SRES or

RCPs) and hydrological models. Both categories of papers may differ with respect to low flow indices.

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Typically, there are separate papers devoted to studies of change in observed and projected indices. The

former are based on rigorous trend detection methods, such as Mann-Kendall test, while in the latter

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formal trend detection is often replaced by a comparison of future horizons with a baseline period.
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Example coding fields to fill in the metadata of included studies can be found in Supplementary Material 1.
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Its two columns refer, respectively, to the subset of observation data used in change (trend) detection in
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observation records and to the model-based projections for the future.

While coding was rather straightforward for the majority of fields from Table 2, the last field called
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“Dominant trend/change direction” was more challenging. We used a qualitative approach focusing on
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general direction of trends or changes rather than exact numbers, which is understandable given a large

heterogeneity of included studies. For the sake of this review we propose a term “evidence item”. An
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evidence item is a prescribed change category (“increase”, “decrease”, “mixed” or “no change”) originating

from an article, assigned to a country in which the study took place, and accompanied with all relevant

meta-data coming from an article. The majority of studies we dealt with were using low flow terminology

so we decided to use the low flow “language” as a reference. The following definitions of four categories

were used:

1. An „increase” denotes a positive outcome, i.e. an upward trend/change in low flows and/or downward

trend/change in intensity/duration/frequency of hydrological droughts.

2. A “decrease” denotes a negative outcome, i.e. a downward trend/change in low flows and/or upward

trend/change in intensity/duration/frequency of hydrological droughts.

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3. “Mixed” denotes no clear dominance of either “increase” or “decrease”, e.g. when one part of the

studied area is characterized by “increases” and another one by “decreases”.

4. “No change” denotes a situation with small/negligible changes (the authors often used greying out to

mark such inconclusive cases and/or explicitly wrote that trends/changes were insignificant).

The process of assigning four change categories to evidence items was somewhat subjective due to obvious

heterogeneity between studies. In general, the categories “increase” and “decrease” denote dominant

increase or decrease across the analyzed gauges, territory, indices, RCPs, time horizons, etc.

Most articles dealt with single countries, and in these cases each article had exactly one evidence item. If

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an article provided evidence on historical trends or future projections from more than one country (e.g. for

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an international river) and the country-specific information on direction of trends or projections was
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available, then multiple evidence items were added to the coding database. In some cases, particularly for

continental-scale modelling studies, it could happen that one article produced up to seven evidence items
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(one for each country).

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4. Results
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4.1. Summary of studies

Figure 2 conveys a PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items of Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses; Moher et
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al., 2009) flow diagram for the present review. We identified 677 unique articles in database searches, of
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which 180 were retained after abstract screening and full text retrieval. Next, we identified 68 articles

fulfilling all inclusion criteria (of which 29 were in the historical trends subset and 39 in the future

projections subset – see Appendices A and B). The two subsets contained 45 and 110 unique evidence

items, respectively. The reason why the projection subset contained significantly higher number of

evidence items is that it included several pan-European or even global studies, from which evidence items

for individual countries could be extracted. For historical trend subset, articles dealing with single countries

were more common, while continental or global studies were rare.

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Figure 2 PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items of Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses) flow diagram for the

present review (scheme adapted from Moher et al., 2009).

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Typical reasons for exclusion of studies at the full text screening stage in HO subset were: 1) dealing with
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water quality trends instead of low flow trends; 2) focusing on single event analysis instead of trend

analysis; 3) dealing with meteorological drought instead of hydrological drought. Common exclusion

reasons in Projections subset were: 1) focusing on indices of mean or seasonal flow instead of low flows; 2)

not dealing with model-based projections; 3) focusing on another aspects such as uncertainty

quantification, drought management and policy.

Furthermore, four potentially relevant review articles were identified, but they mostly dealt with the

Central European drought aspect in slightly different contexts than ours, e.g. relationships with

atmospheric indices (Hannah et al., 2014; Steirou et al., 2017) or a qualitative, historical drought analysis

dating back to Medieval times (Elleder et al., 2020). Dai (2016) conducted a global-scale review of historical
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and future changes in streamflow, but low flows and hydrological droughts were a marginal topic of that

paper. Snowballing of references in these review papers did not add any additional article different from

those already included in our review.

The numbers of included articles published per year have undergone considerable changes over the

analyzed period (Fig. 3). These numbers did not constitute an increasing trend, though. Up to three articles

per year on the topic were published in 2010-2012, while from 2013 onwards it was at least six articles in

each of the years (with a peak of 11 articles in 2015). The year 2021 could not be used for comparison as

database searches were done in this year. Inter-annual variability was somewhat higher for HO subset than

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for FP subset, for which the number of articles in a single year was quite stable in the period from 2013 to

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2020.
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Figure 3 Number of included articles in Historical observations (HO) and Future projections (FP) subsets

according to their publication year.

Table 2 Summary of evidence items included in the HO subset of the review.

Feature Categories and count

Time series length category Long (>60 years): 6
Medium (40-60 years): 28
Short (<40 years): 11
Recentness category Not recent (end year <2005): 13
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Quite recent (end year 2005-2009): 11
Recent (end year 2010-2014): 12
Very recent (end year >2014): 9
Index type1 Minimum: 34
Percentile: 12
LF quantiles: 0
Baseflow: 5
Deficit volume: 8
Duration: 11
Standardized index: 1
Topography Diverse: 20

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Lowland: 3
Mountains: 18

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Uplands: 4
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Number of gauges High (>20 gauges): 20
Medium (5-20 gauges): 10
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Low (>5 gauges): 15
Catchment size (median) Large (>10,000 km2): 2
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Medium (100-10,000 km2): 29

Small (<100 km2): 14
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Country Austria: 4
Czechia: 10
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Germany: 13
Hungary: 2
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Poland: 5
Slovakia: 9
Slovenia: 2
1 The total number of cases is higher than the total number of evidence items, since one evidence item may include data on
multiple indices

Tables 2 and 3 represent a summary of evidence items included in the HO subset of the review and in the

FP subset of the review, respectively. They are based on a more detailed spreadsheet with all meta-data

coded from selected publications (Supplementary Material 2). Table 3 demonstrates that there were 13

papers published in 2010 or later using an outdated data record ending not later than in 2005. The tables

show considerable diversity across evidence items. HO articles had most frequently the following features:

they
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- used medium time series length;

- used minimum-based indices;

- dealt with medium-sized catchments;

- used high (more than 20) number of gauges.

Germany was the country for which the number of evidence items was the highest, followed by Czech

Republic and Slovakia. Studies carried out in diverse and mountainous catchments were by far most

frequent and those in lowland and upland areas were very rare. The diversity in terms of time series end-

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year (“recentness”) was high but a slight majority of evidence items was classified as “not recent”.

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FP articles had most frequently the following features: they
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- used large climate model ensembles combined with RCP scenario family and one emission scenario;
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- used fixed period approach and had continental coverage;
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- dealt with percentile-based indices and

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- used one hydrological model in the analysis.

As with HO subset, Germany was the country with the highest number of articles in the FP subset. All
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studies employed hydrological models in climate change impact assessment (i.e. no studies used the
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hydrological output from the GCM/RCM module directly).

Table 3 also includes detailed numbers of cases per particular emission scenarios. In SRES-based studies

A1B was the most frequently used scenario (present in 23 out of 34 evidence items), whereas in RCP-based

studies RCP8.5 was the most common one (71 out of 76 evidence items). Although SRES and RCP scenarios

cannot be directly matched (cf. IPCC, 2000 for SRES and Moss et al., 2010 for RCP), it is clear that RCP8.5 is

the high-end scenario in the RCP family, whereas A1B is the “middle” scenario in the SRES family (the one

with balanced energy sources). In other words, these results show that scientists tend to use more

pessimistic emission scenarios in recent climate impact studies. We also observed that in the SRES family
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small ensembles were most frequent, while in RCP family large ensembles were most common (see Table

3).

Table 3 Summary of evidence items included in the FP subset of the review.

Feature Categories and count

Climate model ensemble size
Emission scenario family
Small (<4 members): 23
Medium (4-6 members): 34
Large (>6 members): 53
RCP: 76 (of which: RCP2.6: 37
RCP4.5: 45

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RCP6: 17
RCP8.5: 71

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SRES: 34 (of which: A1B: 23
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B1: 4
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Number of emission scenarios 1: 42
2: 26
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3: 33
4: 9
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Future horizon method1 Fixed temporal horizon: 74

Global warming levels: 36
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Study scale Medium: 11

Large: 14
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Continental: 69
Global: 16
Index type2 Minimum: 23
Percentile: 63
Low flow quantiles: 33
Baseflow: 1
Deficit volume: 23
Duration: 28
Standardized index: 2
Hydrological model ensemble size Multiple (>1 member): 33
Single (1 member): 77
Country Austria: 15
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Czechia: 12
Germany: 26
Hungary: 12
Poland: 20
Slovakia: 12
Slovenia: 13
1
A fixed horizon method assumes using fixed future time interval in analysis, e.g., 2080-2099, whereas global warming levels
method assumes using variable future time horizons for which the prescribed warming level was reached for a given combination
of climate model (CM) and emission scenario.
2
The total number of cases is higher than the total number of evidence items, since one evidence item may include data on
multiple indices

Table 4 provides a closer look at the hydrological models used in the included pool of publications. In

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general, large-scale hydrological models were applied most frequently, with LISFLOOD, VIC and E-HYPE

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being three most popular models, with 36, 24 and 22 cases, respectively. These counts include evidence

items, not individual publications. Some of the models listed in Table 4 (e.g. LPJml, JULES, Noah-MP) classify
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themselves as Land Surface Models rather than hydrological models.
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Table 4 List of hydrological models employed in the FP studies.
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Model Count
LISFLOOD 36
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VIC 24
E-HYPE 22
WaterGap 17
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PCR-GLOBWB 14
mHM 9
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JULES 8
LPJml 8
HBV 8
SWAT 7
CamaFlood 7
Noah-MP 7
WBM 7
SWIM 6
TUW 2
MIKE SHE 2
Ecomag 2
PANTA RHEI 1
MPI 1
Orchidee 1
HQSim 1
GR6J 1
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Prevah 1
In summary, the study revealed structural differences between HO and FP studies.

4.2. Historical trends in low flows and hydrological droughts (HO subset)

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Figure 4 Dominant directions of historical changes in low flows categorized according to different criteria:

A. Countries, B. Catchment sizes, C. Number of gauges, D. Topography, E. “Recentness” and F. Time series
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length. Bars denote numbers of evidence items for a given category. Abbreviation of country names: AU –

Austria, CZ – Czech Republic, DE – Germany, HU – Hungary, PL – Poland, SK – Slovakia, SL – Slovenia.

In this and next section we summarize the dominant directions of changes in low flows and hydrological

droughts in Central Europe, treating these terms as synonyms. Hence, an “increase” always refers to higher

values of low flows, lower drought deficits, lower standardized indices values, etc. (see section 3). If we

write about “increases in low flows”, it could as well refer to decreases in hydrological drought hazard.
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There is no clear pattern in dominant direction of historical trends in low flows and hydrological droughts

across analyzed countries (Fig. 4). “No change” class has the highest relative frequency in Czech Republic

and Slovakia, whereas Austria is the only country without evidence for decreasing trends. Decreases in low

flow indices seem to occur less frequently in small than in medium catchments (large catchments, above

10,000 km2 are very rare). Not surprisingly, studies using high number of gauges have most diverse results.

Studies with medium or low number of gauges are more often associated with downward trends in low

flow indices. Topography seems to be a strong factor, as mountainous catchments more frequently have

“no change” or increasing trends than any other topography category. In contrast, decreasing trends

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dominate in lowland, upland and diverse topographies. There is an interesting relationship between the

recentness of the analysis and structure of dominant trend direction. The highest relative frequency of

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downward trends can be observed for two “extreme” cases - very recent time series ending from 2015
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onwards or not recent time series ending before 2005. The evidence for downward trends is relatively less
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frequent for time series ending between 2005 and 2014. The pattern for the time series length seems to be
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less clear, but decreases are more frequent for short time series.

4.3. Projected changes in low flows and hydrological droughts (FP subset)
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The great majority of studies in the future projections subset dealt exclusively with climate change. Yet,
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there were four studies in total that did include other factors (Forzieri et al., 2014; Pohle et al., 2019;
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Schneider et al., 2013; Wanders and Wada, 2015). However, in all of them the effects of climate and human

impact were separated. For the sake of consistency with other studies, we focused only on those results

that were driven by climate change effect.

Figure 5 illustrates dominant future projected change directions categorized according to different criteria,

such as: country, scale of assessment, emission scenario family, climate model and hydrological model

ensemble sizes and index type. As can be seen from this Figure, differences between countries are quite

large: in Germany and Slovenia decreasing changes strongly prevail, whereas in Poland the opposite takes

place. Evidence items originating from continental-scale studies represent predominantly positive changes

in low flows, but the difference between negative changes is marginal. “No change” class occurs only in
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continental-scale studies. Emission scenario family has an undoubtedly strong effect on the dominant

change class: increases in projected low flows dominate for the RCP scenario family, whereas for older

generation of SRES scenarios decreases strongly prevail. There is also a strong effect of the climate model

ensemble size on the results: for small and medium CM ensemble sizes - decreases in future low flows

dominate, whereas for large ensembles - increases dominate. Studies using only one HM tend to report

decreases in low flows in the future. In contrast, in studies using multiple HMs none of the change

categories dominate. Index type also has an effect on results, low flow quantiles (e.g. 50-year drought) are

more frequently associated with future low flow increases than any other metric.

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Figure 5 Dominant directions of projected changes in low flows categorized according to different criteria:

A. Country, B. Scale of assessment, C. Emission scenario, D. GCM/RCM ensemble size, E. HM ensemble size,

F. Index type. Bars denote number of evidence items for a given category. Abbreviations of country names

as in Fig. 4.

Figure 5 misses one important categorization, by terrain types, that was included in Figure 4. Although such

a stratification of dominant change classes would be valuable, the evidence base in the FP subset did not

allow for carrying out such analysis. Continental-scale studies are prevalent in the FP subset (Table 4), and

retrieving information about future low flow and hydrological drought changes by terrain type is usually

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impossible for these studies.

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A closer look into the evidence items originating from RCP family shows that the structure of dominant
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directions of changes does not follow any trend from RCP2.6 to RCP8.5 (Fig. 6). However, comparing RCPs:

4.5 and 8.5 (two scenarios with the highest number of cases), one can notice that low flow increases were
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much more frequent in 4.5 than in 8.5 (53% vs 39%).

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Figure 6 Dominant directions of projected changes in low flows within RCP family.

4.4. Historical observations vs. future projections

It is of considerable interest to compare trends detected in observation records with model-projected

changes for the future. Figure 7 conveys a pie-chart comparison between dominant change directions in

observed trends and in projected tendencies, as reported in reviewed papers. The principal message
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conveyed in Figure 7 is that while in observation-based studies upward trends in low flows are rare (11%),

in model-based simulation studies for the future they are nearly three times more frequent (31%). In

addition, when we focus attention on RCP-based projection studies, this number rises to 41%

(Supplementary Material 3). Low flow decreases are less frequent in FP subset than in HO subset (43% vs.

53%), and the difference is higher when we select RCP-based studies from FP subset. Studies reporting no

changes in low flows are much more frequent in the HO subset (29%) than in the FP subset (11%), whereas

the mixed directions occur more frequently for FP (15%) than for HO (7%).

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Figure 7 Pie-chart comparison between dominant change directions, as reported in papers on trend
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detection in observation records as well as projected tendencies (see Supplementary Material 3 for

comparison with RCP-based projection studies of the FP subset).

4.5. Additional review of Polish language literature

For the mini-review in Polish, we identified in total 33 eligible abstracts, for which 26 full texts were found

(24 in historical trends subset and two in projections subset). After full text screening, we included 10

articles in the HO subset and two articles in the FP subset. It suggests that local language literature has

more to offer in terms of studies on historical observations of low flows and hydrological droughts than on

model-based projections for the future. Although the sample is small, the results on dominant directions of
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changes were not much different from the results reported for Poland in Fig. 4A (see more details in

Supplementary Material 4).

5. Discussion

5.1. Historical observations versus future projections of low flows and droughts

There is quite a widespread and rather established belief among the broad public that in Central Europe

hydrological drought hazard: (1) has been recently gaining strength and (2) this trend is likely to strengthen

in the warmer climate. Our results only partly confirm this statement. Indeed, trends detected in low flow

observation records have more frequently downward than upward direction (53% vs. 11%). However, the

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occurrence of evidence items reporting decreases in low flows is lower for FP than for HO subset (43% vs.

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53%), and even more convincingly, nearly three times more evidence items in FP compared to HO subset
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point out at upward trends in the future (31% vs. 11%), see Figure 7.
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5.1.1 Role of emission scenarios
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The results shown in Figures 4 and 5 present which factors could potentially contribute to these notable

differences. Perhaps the most striking is the difference in dominant future direction of changes between
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studies based on SRES and RCP scenarios (Fig. 6). In the subset of studies using RCP scenarios, 32 out of 76

evidence items report increases in future low flows, whereas in the older generation (SRES) scenarios only
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two out of 34 studies do so. We have not found any notable difference in the spatial scale of assessment
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(e.g. catchment vs. continental scale studies) between two emission scenario families. These results show

that there is presumably an important difference between climate projections driving hydrological models

based on SRES and RCPs. As shown in Figure 6, it is the RCP4.5 scenario featuring precipitation increases

combined with moderate warming in CE (Jacob et al., 2014) that contributes most to these results. Another

indicator relevant for hydrological droughts, the average length of dry spells, was projected to slightly

increase in SRES A1B scenario in Central Europe, whereas in both RCP4.5 and 8.5 changes in Central Europe

were insignificant (Jacob et al., 2014). A recent country-scale climate impact study conducted for Austria

also showed that the newer generation of models (CMIP5-driven EURO-CORDEX RCMs) indicate wetter
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conditions in general on an annual basis and particular wetter winters and springs compared to CMIP3

SRES-based models (Hasslinger et al., 2022).

5.1.2 Role of ensemble size

Another, possibly less expected, factor that seems to influence the results is the climate model ensemble

size. The fraction of evidence items reporting decreases in low flows is overwhelmingly larger for small and

medium ensemble sizes than for large ensemble size. In fact, CE is subject to higher GCM/RCM uncertainty

in both temperature and precipitation projections than western or northern Europe, likely due to its more

continental climate (von Trentini et al., 2019). Multi-model prediction is always better than single-model

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(Hagedorn et al., 2005), and the latter downplays the uncertainty (Kundzewicz et al., 2018). In other words,

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low-flow projections obtained using small climate model ensembles (up to three models) should be treated
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with more caution. It happens, as shown in Figure 5, that these projections based on small ensembles are

most frequently pointing at low flow decreases, in a strong contrast to projections based on large
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ensembles. Apparently, small ensembles are also more often associated with old generation family of SRES
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scenarios.
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5.1.3 Role of trend end year in HO studies

Our analysis showed that the time series of low river flow, ending in most recent years (i.e. after 2015), are
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characterized by more frequent downward trends than those less recent time series. However, the least
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recent time series (ending before 2005) were also associated with mostly decreasing low flows. In general,

this confirms that decadal-scale variability could be another factor influencing trend detection (Hannaford

et al., 2013). This also suggests that the period 2005-2014 was wetter than the period preceding it and the

one that followed, and thus contributed to dampening the signal, which is consistent with recent analyses

of meteorological droughts in CE (Hänsel et al., 2019; Spinoni et al., 2015). In particular, years 2008 and

2010 were exceptionally wet, whereas 2003 and 2015 were among the driest in CE. Actually, the drought of

2003, accompanied by heat waves and forest fires, covered most of the European continent, extending far

beyond CE. The effect of time series end-year could be more accurately estimated if the studies included in
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the review applied a multi-temporal trend analysis technique (Hannaford et al., 2013), but this was

extremely rare.

5.1.4 Spatial patterns

Geographically, the patterns in historical trends and future projections of low flows were not so clear.

Observation records suggest that Austria was the only country in which only upward and mixed directions

of trends were detected. This may be connected to its Alpine hydroclimatology and control on low flows of

freezing and snowmelt processes in addition to summer moisture deficit (Laaha et al., 2017). As shown in

Figure 4, negative trends are also less frequent in mountainous catchments than in other types of

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topography. Interestingly, future projection studies also show that Austria is the least affected by future

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decreases in low flows (Fig. 5). Another country in which low flow projections were predominantly
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increasing was Poland, and the difference between neighbouring Germany, where the opposite direction of

change was present, was noticeable. Two pan-European modelling studies, Papadimitriou (2016) and
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Forzieri et al. (2014), directly showed this gradient in changes in hydrological droughts. Both references are
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included in this review.

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5.2. Systematic review aspects

One of the appreciated roles of systematic reviews is to show the knowledge gaps and knowledge clusters
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in the study field. We have identified the following knowledge gaps concerning low flow and hydrological
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drought studies in Central Europe:

 Studies on low flow trends in lowland or upland catchments

 Studies on low flow trends in large river basins (above 10,000 km2)

 Studies on low flow trends focusing on Hungary and Slovenia (only pan-European studies are

available for these two countries)

Lack of HO type studies focusing on Hungary and Slovenia may as well be related to a bibliographic search

bias. We conducted searches of Web of Science and Scopus in English, whereas non-English literature

search was conducted only in Polish. Polish language search results showed that a significant amount of
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evidence on historical trends in low flows and droughts may be published in local languages rather than in

English.

As for low flow projections, we did not identify any study performed in small (i.e. < 100 km2) catchments,

but this is not necessarily a knowledge gap but rather a scale issue related to climate-hydrology modelling

chain. Coarse resolution of CMs forces applications at larger scales, while at smaller scales downscaling is

needed. With increasing resolution of climate models it may become more and more frequent to carry out

impact studies for small, even ungauged catchments (Tsegaw et al., 2020).

The methodological approach that we have undertaken in this review, i.e. a systematic summary of past

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and future changes in low flows and hydrological droughts, is novel. Our case study in Central Europe

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showed that it works, so it can be extended to other regions of interest, and performed for other
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phenomena of interest. Berrang-Ford et al. (2020) argued that evidence synthesis, being rigorous,

transparent, timely, efficient, as well as fit-for-purpose and applying formal methods, is a missing step
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between primary research and the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) or the IPBES
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(Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) science assessments.

While supporting this view, we agree that future assessment reports could benefit from more evidence-
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synthesis type of reviews. In principle, such reviews do not need to have a regional focus, they can even
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cover the global scale, although this obviously requires more resources.
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5.3. Limitations, biases and uncertainties

One of the limitations of this study is a certain level of subjectivity in coding the data from research articles.

While the great majority of the coding fields were straightforward to fill out, defining the dominant

direction categories was in some cases subjective. In general, it is well known that insufficient level of

reporting in scientific articles hampers systematic reviews (Haddaway and Verhoeven, 2015). In particular,

a recent systematic review on hydrological drought studies concluded that summarizing the information is

difficult due to lack of common methodological foundation and therefore many authors do not follow

standardized methods (Hasan et al., 2019). Slette et al. (2019) revealed in their review on ecological

droughts that many authors do not characterize or quantify drought conditions in a satisfactory way. As an
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example of way forward, it would be a good practice if all authors of trend papers reported the values of

MK test for all gauges as a supplementary material. This would even enable to carry out a formal meta-

analysis, such as the one on biodiversity time series (Pilotto et al., 2020), which currently is rather

problematic for droughts. Similarly for projections, the authors tend to limit the presentation of results to

maps that are often low resolution and do not include any administrative (e.g. national) or biogeographic

borders. High resolution figures with maps having border outlines would help reduce the subjectivity of this

assessment.

The second major problem are confounding factors potentially affecting the direct comparison between HO

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and FP studies. There is a risk that the observed differences between the two datasets are explained by the

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difference in their structure, internal difference, rather than by other natural reasons. In particular, there is

an inherent spatial scale issue in that small to medium-size catchment studies on historical trends are
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compared to model projections carried out at predominantly larger scale (often continental). Here, the
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natural question is if continental-scale studies have sufficient resolution and quality to provide relevant
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local-scale information, or should they only be applied for capturing continental-scale gradients. As shown

in Figures 4 and 5, another general difference between the two data sets is the type of metrics used. Our
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comparison is not metric-specific, as we rely on a fairly well-grounded assumption that different low flow
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and drought indices are frequently correlated (Brunner et al., 2021; Smakhtin, 2001; Tallaksen and Van

Lanen, 2004).
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Is there any alternative approach of answering the question raised in the title? In the ideal world, one

should collect a representative sample of gauged flow data covering the area of Central Europe and carry

out trend detection for a preselected set of metrics. In the next step, one should set up (ideally more than

one) hydrological model covering the same area, and calibrate this model for previously selected gauges

and metrics. In the following step, one should select a range of emission scenarios and climate models to

be used in further analysis and carry out the bias correction. Next, one should drive the hydrological

model(s) with the hindcast simulations and run the trend detection again for the same set of metrics

calculated from the modelled data. This would demonstrate the ability of climate models to represent

historical low flow conditions. Finally, one should run the hydrological model(s) for the future horizons,
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emission scenarios and climate models and detect trends in low flows in the future periods. This would

allow for a fair comparison of projected and observed low flow indices over the study domain, and could

even quantify some sources of uncertainty. The approach outlined above would be free of all major biases.

However, we are not aware of a single study that would carry out this workflow anywhere in the world. Our

review is in our view the best available alternative to the hardly feasible but bias-free workflow proposed

above.

The third major problem is uncertainty, which is certainly larger for projections than for observations. All

individual modelling studies collected here include a significant uncertainty at different steps, which we

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somewhat ignore by assigning one of four categories of future change directions. The “mixed” category

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somehow reflects the uncertainty, but not always. Sometimes it may just mean that half of the area shows

increases and the other half decreases. In this case, there can still be a robust, and informative, result if a
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distinct spatial organization exists, i.e. increases dominate over some areas and decreases dominate over
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other areas.
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In general, there is a great deal of uncertainty in model-based projections of climate change impact on

future low flows and hydrological droughts, hence projections reported in various publications for the same
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region can largely differ. One important source of uncertainty is related to selection of scenarios of future
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socio-economic development, including demography, development, and mitigation path, leading to

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greenhouse gas emission and sequestration and then to atmospheric CO2 concentration. Another group of

sources of uncertainty is related to climate data that are fed to impact (here: hydrological) models.

Uncertainty resides in GCMs; RCMs; as well as statistical downscaling and bias correction methods (if

applied). Finally, hydrological models, their structure and parameterization, as well as input data are

further sources of uncertainty. Here, a particular attention should be put on representation of groundwater

processes, since low river flow is essentially groundwater baseflow. Large-scale hydrological models with

very simple, bucket-like representation of groundwater processes dominate in our review (Reinecke et al.,

2019; Clark et al. 2015). Certainly, differences in projection results reported in various publications may also

stem from assumption of various projection horizons and various reference intervals (Kundzewicz et al.,

2018). At present, state-of-the art model projection studies do not quantify all sources of uncertainty in a
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systematic way; at best, three main considered sources are GCMs, RCPs and impact models (e.g. Vetter et

al., 2017).

6. Conclusion and outlook

This study has supported the common belief that hydrological droughts and low river flows are undergoing

mostly negative changes (more frequent and more severe hydrological droughts, decreasing low flows) in

Central Europe. It also partly denied another common belief that this trend will continue into the future

with warmer climate. If we take an assumption that RCP-based scenarios are more reliable than SRES-based

scenarios and ignore the latter, the results show that the majority of evidence items point out at higher

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future low flows in Central Europe.

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These results pose a practical challenge for water-resource managers and decision makers in Central
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European countries, since a deeply rooted assumption that future hydrological droughts will be more
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severe than today drives the process of designing climate adaptation and risk reduction plans, programmes

of measures, etc. Presented results should not be used as an indication that future increase in hydrological
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drought hazard is a myth. Instead, more research is needed to understand the nature of the difference
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between the observed historical trends and the model-based future projections in this region. Hence, the

policy implications could be formulated as follows:

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- Stationarity is dead (Milly et al., 2008), so that the past is the key to the future in a limited way
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only. Hence we cannot plan for the future by simple projections of the past and we have to

anticipate a change. Yet, translation of this observation to specific policy-related recommendations

is not yet available.

- The signal of change in both the observed past hydrological drought indices and projections for the

future is complex and often weak, i.e. statistically insignificant. Hence we should recognize ranges

of projections, aware of the existence of considerable uncertainty.

Furthermore, there are several aspects important for future drought and low-flow research. Trend

detection research relies on maintenance of hydrological monitoring networks and provision of freely

available data, so efforts should be made to fulfil these two requirements. Model-based impact assessment
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research benefits from harmonized, multi-model inter-comparison projects in which quantification of

uncertainties and their partitioning by sources can be meaningfully done. New generation of impact

modelling studies will soon replace CMIP5 with CMIP6 climate models and will jointly use RCP scenarios

with SSP scenarios. Finally, improved reporting standards of original research would inevitably facilitate

formal meta-analysis and more robust synthesis in the future.

Acknowledgements

The National Science Centre in Poland is gratefully acknowledged for funding the projects RIFFLES “The

effect of RIver Flow variability and Extremes on biota of temperate FLoodplain rivers under multiple

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pressurES” (2018/31/D/ST10/03817) and “Integrated modelling of hydrological and agricultural aspects of

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droughts in the Odra river basin under a changing climate” (2019/35/O/ST10/04392). The authors would

like to thank three reviewers, whose insightful comments helped to improve the original version of the
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manuscript.
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Appendix A List of articles included in the review (part 1 – Trends)

1. Bard, A., B. Renard, M. Lang, I. Giuntoli, J. Korck, G. Koboltschnig, M. Janza, M. d'Amico, and D.

Volken. 2015. Trends in the hydrologic regime of Alpine rivers. Journal of Hydrology 529:1823-

1837.

2. Bernsteinova, J., C. Bassler, L. Zimmermann, J. Langhammer, and B. Beudert. 2015. Changes in

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5. Blahušiaková, A., M. Matoušková, M. Jenicek, O. Ledvinka, Z. Kliment, J. Podolinská, and Z.

Snopková. 2020. Snow and climate trends and their impact on seasonal runoff and hydrological
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drought types in selected mountain catchments in Central Europe. Hydrological Sciences Journal:1-
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14.
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6. Bormann, H., and N. Pinter. 2017. Trends in low flows of German rivers since 1950: Comparability

of different low-flow indicators and their spatial patterns. River Research and Applications 33:1191-

1204.

7. Danneberg, J. 2012. Changes in runoff time series in Thuringia, Germany-Mann-Kendall trend test

and extreme value analysis. Advances in Geosciences 31:49-56.

8. David, V., and T. Davidova. 2015. Analysis of drought events - Case study for blanice river

catchment (Czech Republic). Acta Physica Polonica A 128:317-318.

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9. Fendekova, M., P. Pekarova, M. Fendek, J. Pekar, and P. Skoda. 2014. Global drivers effect in multi-

annual variability of runoff. Journal of Hydrology and Hydromechanics 62:169-176.

10. Fiala, T., T. Ouarda, and J. Hladny. 2010. Evolution of low flows in the Czech Republic. Journal of

Hydrology 393:206-218.

11. Grosser, P. F., and B. Schmalz. 2021. Low Flow and Drought in a German Low Mountain Range

Basin. Water 13:22.

12. Hannaford, J., G. Buys, K. Stahl, and L. M. Tallaksen. 2013. The influence of decadal-scale variability

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on trends in long European streamflow records. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 17:2717-

2733.

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13. Hellwig, J., and K. Stahl. 2018. An assessment of trends and potential future changes in
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groundwater-baseflow drought based on catchment response times. Hydrology and Earth System
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Sciences 22:6209-6224.
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14. Holko, L., M. Danko, and P. Sleziak. 2020. Analysis of changes in hydrological cycle of a pristine

mountain catchment. 2. Isotopic data, trend and attribution analyses. Journal of Hydrology and
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Hydromechanics 68:192-199.
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15. Kȩdra, M. 2019. Multi-annual hydro-climatic trends in the Dunajec Basin (Polish Carpathians).in 2nd
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International Conference on the Sustainable Energy and Environmental Development, SEED 2017.

Institute of Physics Publishing.

16. Krajewski, A., A. E. Sikorska-Senoner, R. Ranzi, and K. Banasik. 2019. Long-Term Changes of

Hydrological Variables in a Small Lowland Watershed in Central Poland. Water 11:564.

17. Laaha, G., J. Parajka, A. Viglione, D. Koffler, K. Haslinger, W. Schoner, J. Zehetgruber, and G. Bloschl.

2016. A three-pillar approach to assessing climate impacts on low flows. Hydrology and Earth

System Sciences 20:3967-3985.

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18. Langhammer, J., and J. Bernsteinová. 2020. Which aspects of hydrological regime in mid-latitude

montane basins are affected by climate change? Water (Switzerland) 12.

19. Langhammer, J., Y. Su, and J. Bernsteinova. 2015. Runoff Response to Climate Warming and Forest

Disturbance in a Mid-Mountain Basin. Water 7:3320-3342.

20. Ledvinka, O. 2015. Evolution of low flows in Czechia revisited. Pages 87-95 Extreme Hydrological

Events. Copernicus Gesellschaft Mbh, Gottingen.

21. Lescesen, I., D. Dolinaj, M. Pantelic, T. Telbisz, and G. Varga. 2020. HYDROLOGICAL DROUGHT

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ASSESSMENT OF THE TISZA RIVER. Journal of the Geographical Institute Jovan Cvijic Sasa 70:89-100.

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22. Piniewski, M., P. Marcinkowski, and Z. W. Kundzewicz. 2018. Trend detection in river flow indices in

Poland. Acta Geophysica 66:347-360.

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23. Raczyński, K., and J. Dyer. 2020. Multi-annual and seasonal variability of low-flow river conditions in
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southeastern Poland. Hydrological Sciences Journal.
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24. Stahl, K., H. Hisdal, J. Hannaford, L. M. Tallaksen, H. A. J. van Lanen, E. Sauquet, S. Demuth, M.
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Fendekova, and J. Jodar. 2010. Streamflow trends in Europe: evidence from a dataset of near-

natural catchments. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 14:2367-2382.

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25. Stahl, K., L. M. Tallaksen, J. Hannaford, and H. A. J. van Lanen. 2012. Filling the white space on maps
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of European runoff trends: Estimates from a multi-model ensemble. Hydrology and Earth System

Sciences 16:2035-2047.

26. Thomas, B., G. Lischeid, J. Steidl, and O. Dietrich. 2015. Long term shift of low flows predictors in

small lowland catchments of Northeast Germany. Journal of Hydrology 521:508-519.

27. Vlach, V., O. Ledvinka, and M. Matouskova. 2020. Changing Low Flow and Streamflow Drought

Seasonality in Central European Headwaters. Water 12:20.

28. Wittenberg, H. 2015. Groundwater abstraction for irrigation and its impacts on low flows in a

watershed in Northwest Germany. Resources 4:566-576.

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29. Zeleňáková, M., P. Purcz, T. Soľáková, and B. Demeterová. 2012. Analysis of trends of low flow in

river stations in eastern Slovakia. Acta Universitatis Agriculturae et Silviculturae Mendelianae

Brunensis 60:265-274.

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Appendix B List of articles included in the review (part 2 – Projections)

1. Bosshard, T., S. Kotlarski, M. Zappa, and C. Schar. 2014. Hydrological Climate-Impact Projections

for the Rhine River: GCM-RCM Uncertainty and Separate Temperature and Precipitation Effects.

Journal of Hydrometeorology 15:697-713.

2. Cammalleri, C., G. Naumann, L. Mentaschi, B. Bisselink, E. Gelati, A. De Roo, and L. Feyen. 2020.

Diverging hydrological drought traits over Europe with global warming. Hydrology and Earth

System Sciences 24:5919-5935.

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3. Christodoulou, A., P. Christidis, and B. Bisselink. 2020. Forecasting the impacts of climate change

on inland waterways. Transportation Research Part D-Transport and Environment 82:10.

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4. Donnelly, C., W. Greuell, J. Andersson, D. Gerten, G. Pisacane, P. Roudier, and F. Ludwig. 2017.
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Impacts of climate change on European hydrology at 1.5, 2 and 3 degrees mean global warming
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above preindustrial level. Climatic Change 143:13-26.
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5. Fangmann, A., and U. Haberlandt. 2019. Statistical approaches for identification of low-flow

drivers: temporal aspects. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 23:447-463.

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6. Forzieri, G., L. Feyen, R. Rojas, M. Florke, F. Wimmer, and A. Bianchi. 2014. Ensemble projections
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of future streamflow droughts in Europe. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 18:85-108.
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7. Huang, S., V. Krysanova, and F. F. Hattermann. 2012. Impacts of climate change on water

availability and crop yield in Germany. Pages 666-675 in iEMSs 2012 - Managing Resources of a

Limited Planet: Proceedings of the 6th Biennial Meeting of the International Environmental

Modelling and Software Society.

8. Huang, S., V. Krysanova, and F. F. Hattermann. 2013. Projection of low flow conditions in

Germany under climate change by combining three RCMs and a regional hydrological model.

Acta Geophysica 61:151-193.

9. Huang, S. C., V. Krysanova, and F. Hattermann. 2015. Projections of climate change impacts on
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floods and droughts in Germany using an ensemble of climate change scenarios. Regional

Environmental Change 15:461-473.

10. Janza, M. 2013. Impact assessment of projected climate change on the hydrological regime in

the SE Alps, Upper Soa River basin, Slovenia. Natural Hazards 67:1025-1043.

11. Kakouei, K., J. Kiesel, S. Domisch, K. S. Irving, S. C. Jahnig, and J. Kail. 2018. Projected effects of

Climate-change-induced flow alterations on stream macroinvertebrate abundances. Ecology and

Evolution 8:3393-3409.

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12. Koirala, S., Y. Hirabayashi, R. Mahendran, and S. Kanae. 2014. Global assessment of agreement

among streamflow projections using CMIP5 model outputs. Environmental Research Letters

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13. Kreye, P., Wörner, V., Gelleszun, M., Meon, G. 2017 Model based projection of changes in low
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Wasserbewirtschaftung 61(4):217-231.

14. Krysanova, V., T. Vetter, S. Eisner, S. Huang, I. Pechlivanidis, M. Strauch, A. Gelfan, R. Kumar, V.
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Declaration of interests

☒ The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships
that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

☐The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as
potential competing interests:

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Highlights

 Systematic review of hydrological droughts and low flows in Central Europe

 Studies divided into historical observations (HO) and future projections (FP)
 Majority (53%) of HO studies show decreases in low flows
 Fraction of studies showing low flow increases in FP is the triple of that in HO
 RCP-based studies show significantly more low flow increases than SRES-based studies

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