Spatiotemporal Analysis of Water Balance Components and Their Projected Changes in Near-future Under Climate Change Over Sina Basin, India

Abstract

Quantification of water-budget components is an essential step in the planning and management of water resources in any river basin. Recently several studies emphasized that climate change would inevitably affect terrestrial hydrology. This study applies distributed hydrological modeling using the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) model to simulate the water balance components in the Sina basin, a drought-prone region in India. We analyzed the long-term spatiotemporal dynamics of precipitation, evapotranspiration, surface runoff, and baseflow components, and their alterations due to impending climate change. The study employed the Mann-Kendall test and Sen’s slope estimators to analyze the spatiotemporal trends of the water balance components during the baseline (1980–2010) and for the near future (2019–2040) periods. For the baseline period, precipitation exhibited an increasing trend, particularly during the monsoon season. On the evaluation of the annual water balance components, it showed that the basin has a low annual rainfall (~ 718 mm) and relatively a very high annual evapotranspiration (~ 572 mm) during 1980–2010, which might be the main reason for frequent droughts in the study basin. Further, for analyzing the climate change impacts on the water budget in the Sina basin, the VIC model was forced with outputs from a set of global climate models for near future (2019–2040) for two emission scenarios RCP4.5 and RCP8.5. Analysis of the results revealed that the water balance components in the near future would be negatively affected by climate change despite their increasing pattern in the baseline period. In comparison to the baseline (1980–2010), the surface runoff would decrease by as much as 32% for the near future, which stresses for planning and adaptation of appropriate mitigation measures in the basin.