Abstract
ABSTRACT In this present era of the Anthropocene, human activities affect hydrology and droughts. Quantifying this human influence improves our understanding and builds fundamental knowledge for water resource management. Analysis of observation data is useful in progressing this knowledge as these human activities and feedbacks are intrinsically included. Therefore, here we present an observation-based approach, the upstream–downstream comparison, to quantify changes in hydrological drought downstream of a human activity. We demonstrate this approach in a basin in northern Chile, where a reservoir was introduced. A sensitivity analysis is performed to assess how different choices of drought analysis threshold can affect the results and interpretation. We find that many commonly used choices do not exclude human activities from the threshold and therefore could be underestimating the change detected due to the human influence. The upstream–downstream comparison avoids this through the application of the upstream station threshold rather than the human-influenced downstream station.
Highlights
Drought is an important natural hazard which can lead to severe environmental and socio-economic impacts in many regions of the world, with losses in agriculture, damage to natural ecosystems and social disruption (Prudhomme et al 2014, Vicente-Serrano et al 2014)
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate this observation-data-driven upstream–downstream approach to quantify the human influence on hydrological droughts downstream of a human activity
Meteorological drought analysis showed that meteorological droughts were similar during the pre-dam and the post-dam period (Table 1); no differences were observed in the maximum meteorological drought characteristics between the two time periods, and minimal differences were seen in the average drought characteristics
Summary
Drought is an important natural hazard which can lead to severe environmental and socio-economic impacts in many regions of the world, with losses in agriculture, damage to natural ecosystems and social disruption (Prudhomme et al 2014, Vicente-Serrano et al 2014). There is a need to quantify the relative importance of human activities as a driver, contributor or alleviator of hydrological drought. This would improve our knowledge on how human activities are impacting on drought to enable better drought preparation and mitigation, as well as improve hydrological modelling. This quantification is difficult as current research is done with a variety of approaches and tools designed for operating in an undisturbed situation
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