Hydrological response to climate change of the Brahmaputra basin using CMIP5 general circulation model ensemble

Abstract

The Ganges–Brahmaputra–Meghna river system carries the world's third-largest fresh water discharge and Brahmaputra alone carries about 67% of the total annual flow of Bangladesh. Climate change will be expected to alter the hydrological cycles and the flow regime of these basins. Assessment of the fresh water availability of the Brahmaputra Basin in the future under climate change condition is crucial for both society and the ecosystem. SWAT, a semi-distributed physically based hydrological model, has been applied to investigate hydrological response of the basin. However, it is a challenging task to calibrate and validate models over this ungauged and poor data basin. A model derived by using gridded rainfall data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite and temperature data from reanalysis product ERA-Interim provides acceptable calibration and validation. Using the SWAT-CUP with SUFI-2 algorithm, sensitivity analysis of model parameters was examined. A calibrated model was derived using new climate change projection data from the multi-model ensemble CMIP5 Project over the South Asia CORDEX domain. The uncertainty of predicting monsoon flow is less than that of pre-monsoon flow. Most of the regional climate models (RCMs) show an increasing tendency of the discharge of Brahmaputra River at Bahadurabad station during monsoon, when flood usually occurs in Bangladesh.

Hydrologic model predictability improves with spatially explicit calibration using remotely sensed evapotranspiration and biophysical parameters

“…There have been several applications of the SWAT model to specifically understand the hydrologic effects of surface depressions (e.g., Almendinger et al, 2011; Evenson et al, 2015, 2018; Liu et al, 2008; Rahman et al, 2016; Wang et al, 2008). SWAT has also been widely used for hydrological modeling in various geophysical settings worldwide, including major river basins in the United States (Rajib and Merwade, 2017), Europe (Abbaspour et al, 2015), Africa (Schuol et al, 2008) and Asia (Islam et al, 2017). Thus, findings from this study may be pertinent to worldwide SWAT model applications and at spatial scales much larger than the Pipestem Creek watershed.…”

Investigating the performance of SWAT and IHACRES in simulation streamflow under different climatic regions in Iran

“…The SWAT model is a physically based, comprehensive, continuous, semi-distributed and watershed-scale simulation model that can simulate most of the hydrological processes in watersheds (Arnold et al, 2012;Kavian et al, 2017;Islam et al, 2017). Primary input data for the SWAT model comprises land use data, a digital elevation map, a soil texture map and meteorological records.…”

“…The optimal value for PBIAS is 0.0, that lowmagnitude values show precision simulation. Positive values and negative values in this criteria indicate overestimation and underestimation, respectively (Islam et al, 2017). The other used criteria for assessment the model performance is Dv criteria.…”

“…The used hydrological models in this study are very common employed and were selected due to their widespread use in Iran and other countries (e.g., Taesombat and Sriwongsitanon, 2010;tho et al, 2016;Islam et al, 2017). The selected watersheds are as the simple watersheds in Iran with three different climate that running different models in these watersheds can give information about models performance in different part of a country.…”

Preliminary study of soot and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in emitted particles from adobe kilns that use scrap tires as fuel

“…The hydrological models used in this study are commonly employed and were selected due to their widespread use in Iran and other countries (Taesombat and Sriwongsitanon, 2010;Tho et al, 2016;Islam et al, 2017). We selected simple watersheds in Iran with three different climates where running different models can give information about their performance in diverse regions of a country.…”