Abstract
The assessment of future climate changes on drought and water scarcity is extremely important for water resources management. A modeling system is developed to study the potential status of hydrological drought and water scarcity in the future, and this modeling system is applied to the Jinghe River Basin (JRB) of China. Driven by high-resolution climate projections from the Regional Climate Modeling System (RegCM), the Variable Infiltration Capacity model is employed to produce future streamflow projections (2020–2099) under two Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios. The copula-based method is applied to identify the correlation between drought variables (i.e., duration and severity), and to further quantify their joint risks. Based on a variety of hypothetical water use scenarios in the future, the water scarcity conditions including extreme cases are estimated through the Water Exploitation Index Plus (WEI+) indicator. The results indicate that the joint risks of drought variables at different return periods would decrease. In detail, the severity of future drought events would become less serious under different RCP scenarios when compared with that in the historical period. However, considering the increase in water consumption in the future, the water scarcity in JRB may not be alleviated in the future, and thus drought assessment alone may underestimate the severity of future water shortage. The results obtained from the modeling system can help policy makers to develop reasonable future water-saving planning schemes, as well as drought mitigation measures.
Highlights
Drought and water scarcity (WS) are inevitable research topics for water resource management in water-stressed areas [1,2,3]
The VIC hydrological model is run at a 0.22-degree resolution (24-h time scale), and the runoff and base flow of the simulated grid cells are processed by a river routing model [42]
The simulated and observed annual runoff volumes produce an DV value of 1.04, which is very close to 1. All these indicate that the simulated runoff series driven by the outputs of Regional Climate Modeling System (RegCM) perform well in capturing the runoff variations in observations, and the future runoff simulations can be used for hydrological drought (HD)- and WS-related calculations
Summary
Drought and water scarcity (WS) are inevitable research topics for water resource management in water-stressed areas [1,2,3]. Drought is a natural disaster that affects a large number of people and causes huge economic losses in the world [4,5]. WS is usually caused by the combined effects of natural factors and excessive water uses of human beings, and has already become a vital obstacle for socio-economic development in many parts of the world [6]. In the context of global climate change, many traditional arid regions may experience more severe drought events in the future, which have even been observed in the past few years [7,8,9]. It is desired to explore the severity of drought and further reveal the associated WS under climate change in order to manage water resources reasonably and meet the needs of sustainable development [6,11]
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