Identification of Streamflow Response to Climate Change and Human Activities in the Wei River Basin, China

Abstract

This final master work presents the results of the evaluation of the model Dynamic Water Balance (DWB) model at daily scale to simulate runoff in tropical watersheds. The present project used as input dataset information generated in the framework of the 2018 National Water Study developed by IDEAM. Therefore, 30 out of 497 watersheds area selected to be assessed in this study. The selection of the watersheds is made through the unsupervised k-means classification algorithm that considered morphometric, hydroclimatological, demographic, and geographic variables and their relationship with a variable that quantified the change in land cover. Thus, 8 clusters or groups of watersheds with similar behavior and heterogeneous characteristics are identified.The 30 selected watersheds were subjected to hydrological modeling with DWB following the hydrological modeling protocol. Then, the uncertainty given by the model parameters is evaluated.Given the results found in the literature review, a multi-objective function combining the KGE and RVE is adopted to improve the daily runoff performance, emphasizing the representation of the flow duration curve which was the major advantage identified by the model developers at the daily scale.The process of evaluating the results showed that the DWB model can reproduce the flow duration curves except for low flows. When evaluating the temporal representation through analysis of the objective function, the model yields very good to satisfactory results in more than 70% of the watersheds in clusters 1, 5, 7 and 8, these basins with good results are located mainly in the mountains.As a general result, this work led to the identification of opportunities for adapting the DWB model to a daily simulation of runoff. It is identified that the hydrologic routing process should be included and for this purpose two strategies are suggested: [1] the inclusion of a hydrologic routing based on the convolution of the unit hydrograph that has been implemented in other parsimonious hydrologic models and [2] the coupling with external algorithms that have been designed to perform this process.

Effects of land use/land cover and climate changes on surface runoff in a semi-humid and semi-arid transition zone in northwest China

“…Nonetheless, the above results indicate that LULC changes contributed considerably to decreased runoff, as reported in previous studies (e.g., Zhang et al, 2011;Zuo et al, 2014;. Additionally, the results suggest that vegetation restoration due to the GGP reduced surface runoff, which agrees with the results of other studies (e.g., Li et al, 2009;Nunes et al, 2011).…”

“…Another study based on the relationship between precipitation and runoff from 1966 to 1970 showed that runoff mainly decreased due to precipitation before the 2000s and due to human activity thereafter, which became dominant (with a contribution of greater than 76 %) (Zhang et al, 2011). The different results reported by Zuo et al (2014) and Liang et al (2015) suggest that assessing the impacts of LULC and climate changes on runoff in relatively large basins (over 1000 km 2 ) is difficult (Chawla and Mujumdar, 2015;Peng et al, 2015b) due to their complex effects on streamflow (Fu et al, 2007) and the variable boundary conditions (Chen et al, 2011;Niraula et al, 2015).…”

“…Studies of the Weihe River basin and Loess Plateau (Liang et al, 2015), which included the JRB as a sub-basin, have identified the response of runoff to climate change and human activities by using a climate elasticity model based on the Budyko framework. Zuo et al (2014) found that runoff in the JRB decreased by 17.79 mm between 1997 and 2009, with human activities and climate change accounting for 51 and 39 % of this decrease, respectively. Liang et al (2015) showed that streamflow decreased substantially from 1961 to 2009, and the contribution of climate change (65 %) to streamflow reduction was much larger than that of ecological restoration measures (35 %) in the JRB.…”

Contributions of Climate Variability and Human Activities to Runoff Changes in the Upper Catchment of the Red River Basin, China

“…In the climate elasticity method, the parameter n in the Yang equation was estimated according to Equations (12) and (19), based on mean P, E 0 , and R in the baseline period; the obtained n value is 1.562. Using Equations (20) and (21), the elasticity coefficients of runoff to P (ε P ) and E 0 (ε E0 ) were calculated as 1.994 and −0.994, respectively.…”

Hydrological Impacts of Climate Change Simulated by HIMS Models in the Luanhe River Basin, North China

“…Mengistu and Sorteberg (2012) applied the SWAT model to test the sensitivity of annual streamflow to climate change within the Eastern Nile River basin and results indicated that the dependence of the response on the strength of the changes was not linear. By using sensitivity-based method and dynamic water balance model, Zuo et al (2014) identified streamflow response to climate change in the Wei River Basin.…”