Separating the effects of climate change and human activities on runoff over different time scales in the Zhang River basin

Abstract

Most studies on separating the effects of climate change and human activities on runoff are mainly conducted at an annual scale with few analyses over different time scales, which is especially essential for regional water resources management. This paper investigates the impacts of climate change and human activities on runoff changes at annual, seasonal and monthly time scales in the Zhang River basin in North China. Firstly, the changing trends and inflection point are analyzed for hydro-climatic series over different time scales. Then the hydrological modeling based method and sensitivity based method are used to separate the effects. The results show that the effect of climate change is stronger than that of human activities on annual runoff changes. However, the driving factors on runoff are different at seasonal scale. In the wet season, the effect of human activities on runoff, accounting for 57 %, is stronger than that of climate change, while in the dry season climate change is the dominant factor for runoff reduction and the contribution rate is 72 %. Furthermore, the effects of climate change and human activities on monthly runoff changes are various in different months. The separated effects over different time scales in this study may provide more scientific basis for the water resources adaptive management over different time scales in this basin.