Abstract. Improving the understanding of past climatic or hydrologic variability has received a large attention in different fields of geosciences, such as glaciology, dendrochronology, sedimentology or hydrology. Based on different proxies, each research community produces different kind of climatic or hydrologic reanalyses, at different spatio-temporal scales and resolution. When considering climate or hydrology, numerous studies aim at characterising variability, trends or breaks using observed time-series of different regions or climate of world. However, in hydrology, these studies are usually limited to reduced temporal scale (mainly few decades, seldomly a century) because they are limited to observed time-series, that suffers from a limited spatio-temporal density. This paper introduces a new model, ANATEM, based on a combination of local observations and large scale climatic informations (such as 20CR Reanalysis). This model allow to build long-term air temperature and precipitation time-series, with a high spatio-temporal resolution (daily time-step, few km2). ANATEM was tested on the air temperature and precipitation time-series of 22 watersheds situated on the Durance watershed, in the french Alps. Based on a multi-criteria and multi-scale diagnostic, the results show that ANATEM improves the performances of classical statistical models. ANATEM model have been validated on a regional level, improving spatial homogeneity of performances and on independent long-term time-series, being able to capture the regional low-frequency variabilities over more than a century (1883–2010).
Air temperature and precipitation variation trends of the Lancang river upstream from 1957 to 2011
