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Abstract. Karst aquifers are difficult to manage due to their uniquehydrogeological characteristics. Future climate projections suggest a strongchange in temperature and precipitation regimes in European karst regionsover the next decades. Alpine karst systems can be especially vulnerableunder changing hydro-meteorological conditions since snowmelt in mountainousenvironments is an important controlling process for aquifer recharge and ishighly sensitive to varying climatic conditions. Our paper presents the firststudy to investigate potential impacts of climate change on mountainous karstsystems by using a combined lumped and distributed modeling approach withconsideration of subsurface karst drainage structures. The study site ischaracterized by high-permeability (karstified) limestone formations and low-permeability(non-karst) sedimentary Flysch. The model simulation undercurrent conditions demonstrates that a large proportion of precipitationinfiltrates into the karst aquifer as autogenic recharge. Moreover, theresult shows that surface snow storage is dominant from November to April,while subsurface water storage in the karst aquifer dominates from May toOctober. The climate scenario runs demonstrate that varied climate conditionssignificantly affect the spatiotemporal distribution of water fluxes andstorages: (1) the total catchment discharge decreases under allevaluated future climate conditions. (2) The spatiotemporal dischargepattern is strongly controlled by temperature variations, which can shift theseasonal snowmelt pattern, with snow storage in the cold season (December toApril) decreasing significantly under all change scenarios. (3) Increasedkarst aquifer recharge in winter and spring, and decreased recharge in summerand autumn, partly offset each other. (4) Impacts on the karst springs aredistinct; the lowest permanent spring presents a “robust” dischargebehavior, while the highest overflow outlet is highly sensitive to changingclimate. This analysis effectively demonstrates that the impacts onsubsurface flow dynamics are regulated by the characteristic dual flow andspatially heterogeneous distributed drainage structure of the karst aquifer.Overall, our study highlights the fast groundwater dynamics in mountainouskarst catchments, which make them highly vulnerable to future changingclimate conditions. Additionally, this work presents a novel holisticmodeling approach, which can be transferred to similar karst systems forstudying the impact of climate change on local karst water resources withconsideration of their individual hydrogeological complexity and hydraulicheterogeneity.

Dynamics of water fluxes and storages in an Alpine karst catchment under current and potential future climate conditions