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Rainstorms impacts on water, sediment, and trace elements loads in an urbanized catchment within Moscow city: case study of summer 2020 and 2021

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Abstract

In 2020 and 2021, the city of Moscow, Russia, has experienced two historical rainfall events that had caused major flooding of small rivers. Based on long-term observation datasets from the surrounding weather stations, regional mesoscale COSMO-CLM climate model results, and a detailed hydrological and water quality monitoring data, we performed a pioneer assessment of climate change and urbanization impact on flooding hazard and water quality of the urban Setun River as a case study. Statistically significant rise of some moderate ETCCDI climate change indices (R20mm and R95pTOT) was revealed for the 1966–2020 period, while no significant trends were observed for more extreme indices. The combined impact of climate change and increased urbanization is highly non-linear and results in as much as a fourfold increase in frequency of extreme floods and shift of water regime features which lead to formation of specific seasonal flow patterns. The rainstorm flood wave response time, involving infiltrated and hillslope-routed fraction of rainfall, is accounted as 6 to 11 h, which is more than twice as rapid as compared to the non-urbanized nearby catchments. Based on temporal trends before and after rainfall flood peak, four groups of dissolved chemicals were identified: soluble elements whose concentrations decrease with an increase in water discharge; mostly insoluble and well-sorted elements whose concentrations increase with discharge (Mn, Cs, Cd, Al); elements negatively related to water discharge during flood events (Li, B, Cr, As, Br and Sr); and a wide range of dissolved elements (Cu, Zn, Mo, Sn, Pb, Ba, La, Cs, U) which concentrations remain stable during rainfall floods. Our study identifies that lack of research focused on the combined impacts of climate change and urbanization on flooding and water quality in the Moscow urban area is a key problem in water management advances.

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The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Funding

Field studies were supported by Russian Science Foundation project 19–77-30004. The analytical experiments were done under Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Russian Federation project 075–15-2021–574. COSMO-CLM model setup is a part of RFBR project 21–55-53039. The methodology of this study is developed under the Interdisciplinary Scientific and Educational School of Lomonosov Moscow State University «Future Planet and Global Environmental Change» and Kazan Federal University Strategic Academic Leadership Program (“PRIORITY-2030”). The research is carried out using the equipment of the shared research facilities of HPC computing resources at Lomonosov Moscow State University. Streamflow patterns analysis was carried out under Governmental Order to Water Problems Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, subject no. FMWZ-2022–0003, project 3.7.

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Conceptualization, original draft preparation—Sergey Chalov; numerical experiments conducting and evaluation, precipitation data analysis, writing—Vladimir Platonov; the rainfall-runoff patterns analysis—Vsevolod Moreido; methodology, validation, writing—Oxana Erina, Dmitriy Sokolov, Maria Tereshina, Mikhail Samokhin; precipitation data preparation and visualization—Yulia Yarinich; review, editing—Nikolay Kasimov. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Sergey Chalov.

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Chalov, S., Platonov, V., Erina, O. et al. Rainstorms impacts on water, sediment, and trace elements loads in an urbanized catchment within Moscow city: case study of summer 2020 and 2021. Theor Appl Climatol 151, 871–889 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-022-04298-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-022-04298-9

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