Abstract
Abstract. The Tarim river basin in China is a huge inland arid basin, which is expected to be highly vulnerable to climatic changes, given that most water resources originate from the upper mountainous headwater regions. This paper focuses on one of these headwaters: the Kaidu river subbasin. The climate change impact on the surface and ground water resources of that basin and more specifically on the hydrological extremes were studied by using both lumped and spatially distributed hydrological models, after simulation of the IPCC SRES greenhouse gas scenarios till the 2050s. The models include processes of snow and glacier melting. The climate change signals were extracted from the grid-based results of general circulation models (GCMs) and applied on the station-based, observed historical data using a perturbation approach. For precipitation, the time series perturbation involves both a wet-day frequency perturbation and a quantile perturbation to the wet-day rainfall intensities. For temperature and potential evapotranspiration, the climate change signals only involve quantile based changes. The perturbed series were input into the hydrological models and the impacts on the surface and ground water resources studied. The range of impact results (after considering 36 GCM runs) were summarized in high, mean, and low results. It was found that due to increasing precipitation in winter, snow accumulation increases in the upper mountainous areas. Due to temperature rise, snow melting rates increase and the snow melting periods are pushed forward in time. Although the qualitive impact results are highly consistent among the different GCM runs considered, the precise quantitative impact results varied significantly depending on the GCM run and the hydrological model.
Highlights
Because the ecological situation of the Tarim River basin in China has seriously declined since the early 1950’s and this is caused by over-consumption of irrigation water and unreasonable hydrological conditions (Han and Luo, 2010; Tong et al, 2006), many hydrological studies have been done to properly understand the processes of that watershed, to restore the ecological system and to support the more sustainable development of the basin’s water resources (Huang et al, 2010; Jiang et al, 2005; Liu et al, 2006; Zhang et al, 2007)
This means that for each month, all wet day intensities were ranked from the highest to the lowest intensity value and empirical probabilities linked to each intensity value
The same was done for the general circulation models (GCMs) based results: intensity perturbation factors were calculated as a function of the probability
Summary
Because the ecological situation of the Tarim River basin in China has seriously declined since the early 1950’s and this is caused by over-consumption of irrigation water and unreasonable hydrological conditions (Han and Luo, 2010; Tong et al, 2006), many hydrological studies have been done to properly understand the processes of that watershed, to restore the ecological system and to support the more sustainable development of the basin’s water resources (Huang et al, 2010; Jiang et al, 2005; Liu et al, 2006; Zhang et al, 2007). Recent research on historical trends of hydro-climatic variables based on historical measurement records have confirmed that temperature at different climate stations of the Tarim River basin has increased consistently with about 1 degree in the past 50 yr (Chen et al, 2007, 2008; Li et al, 2003; Shi et al, 2006; Wang et al, 2003).
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