Abstract
Climate change impact, drought phenomena and anthropogenic stress are of increasing apprehension for water resource managers and strategists, particularly in arid regions. The current study proposes a generic methodology to evaluate the potential impact of such changes at a basin scale. The Lower Zab River Basin located in the north of Iraq has been selected for illustration purposes. The method has been developed through evaluating changes during normal hydrological years to separate the effects of climate change and estimate the hydrologic abnormalities utilising Indicators of Hydrologic Alteration. The meteorological parameters were perturbed by applying adequate delta perturbation climatic scenarios. Thereafter, a calibrated rainfall-runoff model was used for streamflow simulations. Findings proved that climate change has a more extensive impact on the hydrological characteristics of the streamflow than anthropogenic intervention (i.e. the construction of a large dam in the catchment). The isolated baseflow is more sensitive to the precipitation variations than to the variations of the potential evapotranspiration. The current hydrological anomalies are expected to continue. This comprehensive basin study demonstrates how climate change impact, anthropogenic intervention as well as hydro-climatic drought and hydrological anomalies can be evaluated with a new methodology.
Highlights
Background and noveltyAlteration of seasonal river flow elements, such as minimum and maximum flows caused by climate change, drought, and anthropogenic intervention has created concern for hydrologists, owing to the consequences for riverine environments (Doll and Zhang 2010; Mittal et al 2016; Mohammed and Scholz 2017c)
The current study investigates the climate change impact linked with human-induced actions on the hydrological properties of the upper part of the Lower Zab River Basin (LZRB) with an overall drainage area of 12,095 km2 (Fig. 1) by analysing daily hydro-climatic data for the time period between 1979 and 2013
The weather data analysis outcomes prove that the climate of the study area is getting warmer and drier as a consequence of climate change over the past 30 years
Summary
Alteration of seasonal river flow elements, such as minimum and maximum flows caused by climate change, drought, and anthropogenic intervention has created concern for hydrologists, owing to the consequences for riverine environments (Doll and Zhang 2010; Mittal et al 2016; Mohammed and Scholz 2017c). Climate change causes a variation in the weather variables, thereby altering hydrological parameters (Mittal et al 2016). In 2050, climate change has the prospective to intensify water resource pressures for the majority of Asian areas; arid and semi-arid regions would experience an increase in mean air temperature and a decrease in precipitation (IPCC 2014). The surge in air temperature might be in the range between + 6 and + 10% during summer and winter, respectively
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