Abstract
Abstract. Global hydroclimatic conditions have been substantially altered over the past century by anthropogenic influences that arise from the warming global climate and from local/regional anthropogenic disturbances. Traditionally, studies have used coupling of multiple models to understand how land-surface water fluxes vary due to changes in global climatic patterns and local land-use changes. We argue that because the basis of the Budyko framework relies on the supply and demand concept, the framework could be effectively adapted and extended to quantify the role of drivers – both changing climate and local human disturbances – in altering the land-surface response across the globe. We review the Budyko framework, along with these potential extensions, with the intent of furthering the applicability of the framework to emerging hydrologic questions. Challenges in extending the Budyko framework over various spatio-temporal scales and the use of global datasets to evaluate the water balance at these various scales are also discussed.
Highlights
Besides the aridity index, which is defined as the ratio of the mean annual potential evapotranspiration to the mean annual precipitation, Milly (1994) and Sankarasubramanian and Vogel (2002) proposed additional controls on the long-term water balance, including seasonality and soil moisture holding capacity
Given the Budyko framework’s ability to capture the fundamental dimensions of land-surface fluxes, its emphasis on describing patterns of variation across differing hydrogeologic and hydroclimatic regimes, and, by extension, its emphasis on an integrative, Darwinian approach, a global synthesis addressing the variability in these fluxes across natural and human-altered watersheds should provide insights into the sensitivity of the critical hydroclimatic processes to local and global changes in the Anthropocene
In the long-term water balance context, defining the demand– supply relationship explains the predominant controls on the spatio-temporal variability of mean annual runoff and mean annual evapotranspiration based on the basin aridity, seasonality of demand and supply attributes, and soil moisture holding capacity (Milly, 1994)
Summary
The traditional Budyko formulation provides the long-term water balance as a simple but effective partitioning of precipitation into runoff and evapotranspiration, and it has been verified over numerous natural watersheds around the globe (Sankarasubramanian and Vogel, 2003; Zhang et al, 2004; Yang et al, 2007; Li et al, 2013; Padrón et al, 2017). Besides the aridity index, which is defined as the ratio of the mean annual potential evapotranspiration to the mean annual precipitation, Milly (1994) and Sankarasubramanian and Vogel (2002) proposed additional controls on the long-term water balance, including seasonality and soil moisture holding capacity These additional controls enhance the ability of the Budyko framework to explain the spatial variability in mean annual runoff at the continental scale. Given the Budyko framework’s ability to capture the fundamental dimensions of land-surface fluxes, its emphasis on describing patterns of variation across differing hydrogeologic and hydroclimatic regimes, and, by extension, its emphasis on an integrative, Darwinian approach, a global synthesis addressing the variability in these fluxes across natural and human-altered watersheds should provide insights into the sensitivity of the critical hydroclimatic processes to local and global changes in the Anthropocene
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