Abstract
The discharge of one of the world’s largest river - Indus River was reported to be increasing that was not supported by the Karakoram (KK) glacier expansion. A major hydrometric bias was ignored, which seemed similar to the montage that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear. This study proposed a framework for quantifying the bias resulting from inaccurate data affecting hydrologic studies on the Indus. We constructed a statistical model by converting the rating curves of rivers into air temperature (T) – discharge (Q) curves from an adjacent catchment in China where flow measurement was carried out using a standard method. We found that most flow data for the Indus were much greater than the error limits of T-Q curves estimated by daily data, a greater bias occurred in recent decades when discharge increased, the higher the flow was, the larger the bias was. The estimated mean annual and maximum monthly bias was 22.5% and 210%, respectively. These biases indicated that discharge increase in the Indus probably resulted from the large errors of hydrometrics without a scientific basis. We suggested a montage bias was needed in the hydrologic science of KK’s rivers that may strongly affect water resource management.
Highlights
The Upper Indus River (UIR) originates in two great mountain ranges, the KK and Northwest HL, while its Kabul branch drains the Hindu Kush Mts. (Fig. 1a)
According to the same pattern of both regional climates in the KK rivers, we explored the teleconnections of monthly air temperature and precipitation in the summer melt period (May.-Sep.) between the LG station in Yarkand River (YKR) and the Skardu station in the Indus
For 50 years, there is a strong correlation or similarity of the temperature and a weak correlation in precipitation (0.16–0.52, p < 0.05) between the two areas (0.24–0.7, p < 0.01) which are shown in Fig. 2 and the unreliable correlations between their discharge appear in YKR and the Indus
Summary
The Upper Indus River (UIR) originates in two great mountain ranges, the KK and Northwest HL, while its Kabul branch drains the Hindu Kush Mts. (Fig. 1a). It is puzzling why this should be so, and there is an urgent need for reliable quantitative estimates of the relative contributions of ice, snow and rainfall to these rivers If these are available, the hydrologic effects of two main concerns of climate change, global warming and changes in annual precipitation patterns, can be ascertained with greater certainty. Some investigations suggest a slight mass gain in recent decades[33] These assessments do not take into account uncertainties and differences in water balance and relative contributions of rainfall, snow and ice of rivers in the region. Two basic considerations are the glacier coverage, which is large in both cases and certain similarities in climate, both flow through the strongly glaciated region in the world with high elevation, deep valleys and river sediments. The extra flow is approximately 40% larger than the monthly average at the KC
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