Abstract
Regional hydrological modeling in ungauged regions has attracted growing attention in water resources research. The southern Tibetan Plateau often suffers from data scarcity in watershed hydrological simulation and water resources assessment. This hinders further research characterizing the water cycle and solving international water resource issues in the area. In this study, a multi-spatial data based Distributed Time-Variant Gain Model (MS-DTVGM) is applied to the Yarlung Zangbo River basin, an important international river basin in the southern Tibetan Plateau with limited meteorological data. This model is driven purely by spatial data from multiple sources and is independent of traditional meteorological data. Based on the methods presented in this study, daily snow cover and potential evapotranspiration data in the Yarlung Zangbo River basin in 2050 are obtained. Future (2050) climatic data (precipitation and air temperature) from the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-AR5) are used to study the hydrological response to climate change. The result shows that river runoff will increase due to precipitation and air temperature changes by 2050. Few differences are found between daily runoff simulations from different Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios (RCP2.6, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) for 2050. Historical station observations (1960–2000) at Nuxia and model simulations for two periods (2006–2009 and 2050) are combined to study inter-annual and intra-annual runoff distribution and variability. The inter-annual runoff variation is stable and the coefficient of variation (CV) varies from 0.21 to 0.27. In contrast, the intra-annual runoff varies significantly with runoff in summer and autumn accounting for more than 80% of the total amount. Compared to the historical period (1960–2000), the present period (2006–2009) has a slightly uneven intra-annual runoff temporal distribution, and becomes more balanced in the future (2050).
Highlights
Regional hydrological modeling in ungauged regions has attracted growing attention in water resource management research and has become a grand challenge for theoretical hydrology [1,2]
Using the distributed hydrological model (MS-DTVGM) with physical mechanisms based on multi-source spatial data, runoff processes in the Yarlung Zangbo River basin for the present period (2006–2009) is simulated
Utilizing future temperature and precipitation data under the three Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) situations (RCP2.6, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) of the fifth Assessment Report of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-AR5), this study investigates the hydrological response to climate change
Summary
Regional hydrological modeling in ungauged regions has attracted growing attention in water resource management research and has become a grand challenge for theoretical hydrology [1,2]. Rivers in the Himalayan mountain area of the southern Tibetan Plateau often suffer from data scarcity required for hydrological simulation and water resources assessment due to extreme conditions in cross-boundary rivers This hinders characterizing the water cycle and climate change studies in this area, and finding solutions to international water-resource issues. In the Yarlung Zangbo River, runoff simulations focused on the water cycle and using a physically based distributed hydrological model with high spatial resolution have been rarely completed. A multi-spatial data based Distributed Time-Variant Gain Model [37] (MS-DTVGM) is applied to the Yarlung Zangbo River basin to simulate runoff. Using the distributed hydrological model (MS-DTVGM) with physical mechanisms based on multi-source spatial data, runoff processes in the Yarlung Zangbo River basin for the present period (2006–2009) is simulated. The distribution and variation of the past (1960–2000), present (2006–2009) and future (2050) runoff characteristics are analyzed in the Yarlung Zangbo River basin, southern Tibetan Plateau
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