Climate change impact assessment on hydrology of a small watershed using semi-distributed model

Brij Kishor Pandey,A K Gosain,George Paul,Deepak Khare

doi:10.1007/s13201-016-0383-6

Abstract

This study is an attempt to quantify the impact of climate change on the hydrology of Armur watershed in Godavari river basin, India. A GIS-based semi-distributed hydrological model, soil and water assessment tool (SWAT) has been employed to estimate the water balance components on the basis of unique combinations of slope, soil and land cover classes for the base line (1961–1990) and future climate scenarios (2071–2100). Sensitivity analysis of the model has been performed to identify the most critical parameters of the watershed. Average monthly calibration (1987–1994) and validation (1995–2000) have been performed using the observed discharge data. Coefficient of determination (R^{2}), Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (ENS) and root mean square error (RMSE) were used to evaluate the model performance. Calibrated SWAT setup has been used to evaluate the changes in water balance components of future projection over the study area. HadRM3, a regional climatic data, have been used as input of the hydrological model for climate change impact studies. In results, it was found that changes in average annual temperature (+3.25 °C), average annual rainfall (+28 %), evapotranspiration (28 %) and water yield (49 %) increased for GHG scenarios with respect to the base line scenario.

Highlights

Global temperature is raising due to accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and affecting the natural and managed ecosystems (Xie et al 2008)
This study is an attempt to quantify the impact of climate change on the hydrology of Armur watershed in Godavari river basin, India
The impacts of climate change on hydrology of watersheds are usually evaluated by defining scenarios for changes in climatic inputs to a hydrological model and these scenarios based on the futuristic emissions of greenhouse gases (Gosain et al 2006; Hossain 2014; Johnston and Smakhtin 2014; Srinivasan et al 1998)

Summary

Introduction

Global temperature is raising due to accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and affecting the natural and managed ecosystems (Xie et al 2008). The most important impact of climate change will be changes in regional and local water availability (Evan et al 2012; Poulin et al 2011; Yadav et al 2010). The impacts of climate change on hydrology of watersheds are usually evaluated by defining scenarios for changes in climatic inputs to a hydrological model and these scenarios based on the futuristic emissions of greenhouse gases (Gosain et al 2006; Hossain 2014; Johnston and Smakhtin 2014; Srinivasan et al 1998). The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) developed new emission scenarios based on emissions of greenhouse gases (Girod et al 2009; Solomon 2007). Evaluation of impact of climate change on hydrology of catchment is very important for the

Methods

Results

Conclusion