Abstract
The streamflow into Miyun Reservoir, the only surface drinking water source for Beijing City, has declined dramatically over the past five decades. Thus, the impacts of climate variability and human activities (direct and indirect human activities) on streamflow and its components (baseflow and quickflow) needs to be quantitatively estimated for the sustainability of regional water resources management. Based on a heuristic segmentation algorithm, the chosen study period (1969–2012) was segmented into three subseries: a baseline period (1969–1979) and two impact periods I (1980–1998) and II (1999–2012). The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was adopted to investigate the attributions for streamflow change. Our results indicated that the baseflow accounted for almost 63.5% of the annual streamflow based on baseflow separation. The contributions of climate variability and human activities to streamflow decrease varied with different stages. During impact period I, human activities was accountable for 54.3% of the streamflow decrease. In impact period II, climate variability was responsible for 64.9%, and about 8.3 mm of baseflow was extracted from the stream on average based on the comparison of the observed streamflow and simulated baseflow. The results in this study could provide necessary information for water resources management in the watershed.
Highlights
It has been shown that the effects arising from global warming modify the precipitation pattern, which further affects the hydrological processes, with possible unfavorable effects on regional ecological environments that are dependent on these resources [1,2]
(2) the annual precipitation non-significantly reduced during the period of 1969–2012, flood season precipitation decreased at a significant level of 0.05
The breakpoint analysis was carried out by heuristic segmentation algorithm, and baseflow separation was conducted by the automatic baseflow filter
Summary
It has been shown that the effects arising from global warming modify the precipitation pattern, which further affects the hydrological processes, with possible unfavorable effects on regional ecological environments that are dependent on these resources [1,2]. Climate variability and human activities are two major driving factors influencing the hydrological processes and spatio-temporal distribution of water availability. Streamflow, which is a combination of hydrological cycles in the routing phase and in the land phase, has often been adopted as an indicator of hydrological responses to climate variability and human activities at the watershed scale [6,7]. From the perspective of regional water resources sustainability, it is imperative to ascertain the impacts of climate variability and human activities on streamflow change and determine their relative contributions at the watershed level. The quantitative identification of the influences of climate variability and human activities on streamflow change at the basin level has already become an active research area [8,9]
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