Abstract
River runoff is a key attribute of the land surface, that additionally has a strong influence on society by the provision of freshwater. Yet various environmental factors modify runoff levels, and some trends could be detrimental to humanity. Drivers include elevated CO2 concentration, climate change, aerosols and altered land-use. Additionally, nitrogen deposition and tropospheric ozone changes influence plant functioning, and thus runoff, yet their importance is less understood. All these effects are now included in the JULES-CN model. We first evaluate runoff estimates from this model against 42 large basin scales, and then conduct factorial simulations to investigate these mechanisms individually. We determine how different drivers govern the trends of runoff over three decades for which data is available. Numerical results suggest rising atmospheric CO2 concentration is the most important contributor to the global mean runoff trend, having a significant mean increase of +0.18 ± 0.006 mm yr−2 and due to the overwhelming importance of physiological effects. However, at the local scale, the dominant influence on historical runoff trends is climate in 82% of the global land area. This difference is because climate change impacts, mainly due to precipitation changes, can be positive (38% of global land area) or negative (44% of area), depending on location. For other drivers, land use change leads to increased runoff trends in wet tropical regions and decreased runoff in Southeast China, Central Asia and the eastern USA. Modelling the terrestrial nitrogen cycle in general suppresses runoff decreases induced by the CO2 fertilization effect, highlighting the importance of carbon–nitrogen interactions on ecosystem hydrology. Nitrogen effects do, though, induce decreasing trend components for much of arid Australia and the boreal regions. Ozone influence was mainly smaller than other drivers.
Highlights
Climate change, direct human activity and perturbed biogeochemical cycles are rapidly altering the hydrological cycle (Milly et al 2005, Huntington 2006)
The NCEP precipitation data shows smaller increases than other precipitation datasets in high latitudes. These Eurasian Arctic rivers are highly affected by permafrost, which as yet is not fully included in JULES model with carbon–nitrogen interactions (JULESCN)
Climate as the dominant driver is for over 82% of global land area, whereas rising atmospheric CO2 concentration dominates runoff increases for
Summary
Direct human activity and perturbed biogeochemical cycles are rapidly altering the hydrological cycle (Milly et al 2005, Huntington 2006). River runoff is a key component of the hydrological cycle, providing a robust metric of freshwater availability to humans and ecosystems (Oki and Kanae 2006). Uncertainties exist in drivers of runoff variability, preventing a better understanding and quantification of spatio-temporal distributions of freshwater provision (Yang et al 2017). To reduce such uncertainty, the careful merging of measurements and models needs to continue. The knowledge gained enables the hydrological community to support adaptation and mitigation strategies for climate change and related sustainable management (Jiménez Cisneros et al 2014). Better understanding increases capacity to perform more accurate projections of future runoff
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