Assessment of Hydrologic Response to Future Climate Change in the Tone River Basin of Japan

Abstract

An assessment of hydrologic response (basin hydrology for snowmelt runoff, flood and drought) to future climate change in the Tone river basin was carried out using distributed biosphere hydrological model with energy balance based multilayer snow physics (WEB-DHM-S) and with integrated dam operation modules. Bias corrected output of the numerical weather prediction modeling with the incremental dynamical downscaling and analysis system (INDDAS) technique was used for long-term hydrologic simulation (1981-2009 and 2081-2109). Although variation in winter precipitation was found insignificant in future, summer precipitation was found remarkably increased. Hydrologic simulation results showed that snow melts at faster rate in future due to rise in temperature causing a considerable shift of snowmelt runoff from May to April at snow dominated sub basins. Top 30 flood analysis revealed that future flood risk at Fujiwara dam is reduced by the shift of seasonality of snowmelt runoff however, the flood at Yattajima point showed an increasing trend. Likeliness of drought in future will be reduced as future low flow will increase; however yearly analysis of the water level, dam inflow and outflow revealed that severe drought will prevail in future which follows the trend of occurrence of drought in the past.

Evaluation of Various Precipitation Products Using Ground-Based Discharge Observation at the Nujiang River Basin, China

“…The WEB-DHM has already been widely used, and the model has been shown to perform well in several basins in the TP, including the Naqu River basin, the Lake Seling Co basin, the upper Yellow River basin, and the Lhasa River basin. Additionally, the model had shown good simulation ability in other countries, such as the upper Tone River basin in Japan and the Dudhkoshi River basin in Nepal [21,28,[40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47].…”

Coupled Snow and Frozen Ground Physics Improves Cold Region Hydrological Simulations: An Evaluation at the upper Yangtze River Basin (Tibetan Plateau)

“…The WEB-DHM model was continuously being developed and included empirical frozen ground parameterization (Wang et al, 2010) and the three-layer snow scheme (Shrestha et al, 2010(Shrestha et al, , 2012(Shrestha et al, , 2016. Recently, a new land surface model with coupled snow and frozen ground physics (HydroSiB2-SF) was developed based on a hydrologically improved land surface model (HydroSiB2), which could be viewed as the onedimensional version of WEB-DHM, and indicated good performance at two typical sites on the TP (Wang, Zhou, et al, 2017).…”