Abstract
Land use and water management have considerable impacts on regional climates. This paper proposes that in humid regions with low wind patterns the construction of hydropower storage reservoirs contributes to the increases in the probability of precipitation in the regional climate. This observation has been tested with a methodology that calculates the cumulative influence of reservoir construction in the basins surrounding with a proposed index named Cumulative Impact of Existing Reservoirs, and compares this index with the historical flow of the rivers. It was found that the construction of reservoirs in Brazil had a considerable impact on its river flows.
Highlights
Land use can have a substantial impact on the climate and precipitation profile of a region
This paper argues that the reduction in river flow is partially caused by the reduction in the storage reservoirs at the head of the river
The Cumulative Impact of Existing Reservoirs index has been compared with the historical natural river flows for the Itaipú, Furnas, Barra Bonita, Três Marias (Fig. 2), Rosana, Salto Santiago, Machadinho, and Passo Real Dams (Fig. 3)
Summary
Land use can have a substantial impact on the climate and precipitation profile of a region. Conversion of forest into agricultural land affects precipitation patterns (Li et al 2009; Adnana and Atkinson 2011; Price 2011), the impact of deforestation can affect regional average temperatures (Bonan 1997) as well as other impacts (DeAngelis et al 2010; Mueller et al 2015; Chen and Dirmeyer 2017). Land and water management have an important impact on regional climate (Betts 2001; Tomer and Schilling 2009). This correlation between land and water management and climate has even been proposed as a regional adaptation measure for global warming (Hirsch et al 2017), and included into weather forecast models (Li et al 2018)
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