Abstract
Abstract. With dramatic changes in climate and land-cover patterns around the world, it is of great significance to evaluate the corresponding influence on runoff change as water resources have become a strategic resource. We analysed the runoff change driven by landscape change and climate variation in Hanjiang River basin, which is the water source area of the central route of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project in China. Results show that the runoff decreased greatly from 1960 to 2012 in all the six selected sub-catchments. Attribution analysis results show that reduction of precipitation contributed to the catchment runoff decrease by 39.5–64.9% and landscape change, represented by increase of the parameter in the mathematical Budyko function contributed to the runoff decrease by 34.4–63.3%, while potential evapotranspiration change had a slightly negative contribution. In addition, the contribution is spatially variable from downstream to upstream. We conclude with a qualitative description about how water availability changes under changing landscape and climate conditions, and focus on the impact of vegetation cover change.
Highlights
Distinguishing the impacts of climate change and human activities on runoff is recognized a necessary for water resources management and land-use planning in changing environments
First we examine the change of annual runoff during the last five decades in Hanjiang River basin
SUMMARY This study quantified the impacts of landscape change and climate variation on the runoff change in Hanjiang River basin
Summary
Distinguishing the impacts of climate change and human activities on runoff is recognized a necessary for water resources management and land-use planning in changing environments. Regional impacts of climate change and human activities on hydrology vary from place to place and need to be investigated on a local scale. Both process-based and elasticitybased methods have been used to quantify the effects of climate and humans on runoff. The elasticity-based method was initially proposed by Schaake (1990), and has been developed by Xu et al (2014) using analytical elasticity based on the Budyko framework This method uses elasticity coefficients to represent the sensitivity of runoff to meteorological factors and catchment properties. Different from the process-based method, that relies on a large amount of data and is constrained by the difficulties associated with the parameterization of these hydrological models, the Budyko elasticity-based method is simple and physically-based, and can express the nonlinear interaction between climate, hydrology and landscape in a catchment (Xu et al, 2014)
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