Abstract
Abstract. In this study, a framework to project the potential future climate change impacts on extreme hydrological drought events in the Weihe River basin in North China is presented. This framework includes a large-scale hydrological model driven by climate outputs from a regional climate model for historical streamflow simulations and future streamflow projections, and models for univariate drought assessment and copula-based bivariate drought analysis. It is projected by the univariate drought analysis that future climate change would lead to increased frequencies of extreme hydrological drought events with higher severity. The bivariate drought assessment using copula shows that future droughts in the same return periods as historical droughts would be potentially longer and more severe, in terms of drought duration and severity. This trend would deteriorate the hydrological drought situation in the Weihe River basin. In addition, the uncertainties associated with climate models, hydrological models, and univariate and bivariate drought analysis should be quantified in the future research to improve the reliability of this study.
Highlights
Droughts are the most severe disasters leading to the greatest economic losses in China
As streamflow is an important index to characterize hydrological droughts, a large-scale hydrological model was driven by climate outputs from a region climate model for historical streamflow simulations and future streamflow projections, and the simulated streamflow was used for univariate and copula-based bivariate drought analysis
A framework to project the potential future climate change impacts on extreme hydrological drought events in the Weihe River basin in North China was established in this study
Summary
Droughts are the most severe disasters leading to the greatest economic losses in China. Climate change in the past few decades has altered drought frequency and characteristics such as duration and severity in many regions of China. Even in humid Southern China where droughts used to be less frequent, several long-duration, severe and expansive drought events occurred in the 2000s and 2010s, causing serious water shortage problems. It is very necessary to project the possible climate change impacts on future drought occurrence so as to provide effective guidelines for climate change adaptions. This study presents a framework to project future climate change impacts on extreme hydrological droughts in the Weihe River basin in China. As streamflow is an important index to characterize hydrological droughts, a large-scale hydrological model was driven by climate outputs from a region climate model for historical streamflow simulations and future streamflow projections, and the simulated streamflow was used for univariate and copula-based bivariate drought analysis
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