Role of groundwater during hydrological extremes in the glaciated and snow-fed high Alpine catchment under climate change

Groundwater plays a pivotal role in the water cycle but its interplay with hydrological processes has often been neglected or overly simplified in hydrological models of high-elevation catchments. This may increase uncertainties in future projections and impede a holistic understanding of the hydrological changes. High Alpine catchments, in fact, display complex surface and subsurface processes and lack of observations. Here, we investigate the role of alpine groundwater in the hydrologic response by partitioning the observed streamflow variations to glacier recessions, snowmelt, rainfall, and for the first time - groundwater fluxes at the Martell valley in Italy since the 2000s. To examine the dynamic interactions of these components in detail, we adopt a modeling framework that combines the physics-based model WaSiM (with an integrated groundwater module) with meteorological inputs obtained from the weather model WRF. Extensive field observations (meteorology, hydrology, geomorphology, piezometric levels, stable water isotopes) are collected to constrain the hydrological model parameters and for model evaluation. This study quantifies the contribution of groundwater in moderating the intensity and timing of hydrological extremes (high and low flows) in the selected high-elevation catchment and emphasizes the significance of groundwater in sustaining water availability in this sensitive environment subject to climate change.