Process that impact runoff generation in Northern Latitudes

It is possible and necessary to model river flows in the current climate. Water resource engineers and natural hazard engineers require accurate forecasts of the river flows for given precipitation scenarios. A high level of accuracy is possible as the computer models can be trained on past events. But, to extend that prediction accuracy into the following decades will require more physically-based models, with less training as the boundary conditions of the problem move away from conditions we have encountered. This is particularly the case in the Northern latitudes, where the river flows are the consequences of multiple causes: some coincident, some sequential, all of them important and all of them subject to change in the new warmer climate of the Arctic and Boreal zones. This technical report lays out the fundamental processes that affect the river flows in the North and how they are represented in both hydrological and meteorological models. The question that it aims to answer is: to what processes are the river in the northern latitudes sensitive and how can we represent these processes in our large scale models?