Abstract ID: 3.12204 | Accepted as Talk | Talk/Oral | TBA | TBA

This study presents a refined perspective on hydrological drought modeling, emphasizing the critical role of hydropower management representation in accurately simulating drought dynamics. While the structural design of hydrological models is essential for capturing drought responses to climate forcing, our findings highlight that simulation accuracy also hinges on incorporating detailed reservoir operations into the modeling framework. Focusing on the Adige River basin, a highly regulated Alpine watershed, we apply the distributed HYPERstreamHS hydrological model, which explicitly represents human systems. We evaluate three hydropower configurations: NAT (no infrastructure), MAX (operations always at maximum capacity), and FULL (detailed operational rules) to assess their influence on drought simulation and statistical representation. Our results demonstrate that only the FULL configuration, which integrates comprehensive hydropower operations, accurately reproduces observed drought characteristics, including severity-duration relationships and return periods. The NAT and MAX configurations, which are the most commonly adopted yet oversimplified approaches, underestimate drought intensity and fail to capture critical propagation processes. A bivariate copula analysis reveals that the FULL configuration uniquely replicates the observed dependence between drought severity and duration, essential for understanding drought propagation in regulated systems. The findings also emphasize the challenges of predicting and monitoring droughts in mountainous regions, where human water management profoundly impacts low-flow regimes and up-downstream connectivity. This research advances the understanding of drought occurrence and resilience in high-altitude ecosystems, underscoring the importance of integrating detailed hydropower operations into hydrological models. The findings contribute to cross-disciplinary dialogues on drought prediction, inform adaptation strategies, and support more effective water resource management in highly regulated mountain regions.