The Impact of Climate Change on the Water Resources of the Amu Darya Basin in Central Asia

White, Christopher J.; Tanton, T.W.; Rycroft, David

doi:10.1007/s11269-014-0716-x

Cited by 91 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…In history, irrigated agriculture which relies on water resources was always the basic social economical engine in Central Asia (McKinney 2004;Clarke et al 2005). Since Naryn River is an important water resource for the Fergana Basin, which is the most densely populated area in Central Asia, fluctuations in drought and streamflow can have serious geopolitical consequences (White et al 2014;Duishonakunov et al 2014). Correlations of our SPEI reconstruction with annual and highest monthly streamflow series of Naryn River, calculated over the 1951-1995 common period are 0.60 and 0.64 (p < 0.01), respectively ( Fig.…”

Section: Current and Historical Drought Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Drought Reconstruction from the Low-Elevation Juniper Forest of Northwestern Kyrgyzstan since CE 1565

Chen

et al. 2019

Socio-Environmental Dynamics Along the Historical Silk Road

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Naryn River provides large amounts of water resource for Central Asian countries. Thus, the severity and frequency of drought variation relate to runoff has important influences on social and economic development of this region. In this study, the new tree-ring width chronologies of juniper trees from the low-elevation site of the western Tien Shan are used to reconstruct drought variation for northwestern Kyrgyzstan and place the short instrumental period of Standardised Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) in a long-term context. The SPEI reconstruction successfully reflects the dry and wet periods over the past 451 years, and captures a recent wetting trend that generally agrees with the drought reconstructions for the spruce-dominated area. However, some differences between the tree-ring records from spruce-dominated and juniper-dominated areas reflect regional climate differences. The comparison between drought events in the SPEI reconstruction and historical event of Central Asia reveals drought variations have had profound influences on some historical archives over the past several centuries. This study provides the first long-term SPEI reconstruction and drought evaluation from the low-altitude area of Central Asia, contributing to climate change issues in Central Asia.

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Section: Current and Historical Drought Perspectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Drought Reconstruction from the Low-Elevation Juniper Forest of Northwestern Kyrgyzstan since CE 1565

Chen

et al. 2019

Socio-Environmental Dynamics Along the Historical Silk Road

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“…Distributed hydrological models require spatially distributed, long-term, continuous data to simulate the impact of climate change and management practices on hydrological processes. However, conventional weather stations are often sparsely distributed and cannot fully represent the climate conditions across a watershed, particularly if large hydro climatic gradients exist [8][9][10]. In addition, weather station records often do not cover the proposed simulation period or contain gaps.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some studies have been designed to overcome these data limitations. Monthly reanalyzed data from the Climate Research Unit (CRU TS.3.2) have been used in numerous studies [9,33,35,36]. Precipitation estimation from remotely sensed information using artificial neural networks (PERSIANN) precipitation products [8], the Willmott archived data set, the GSMaP satellite-driven data set [37], the global climatology precipitation product (GPCP), the Global Precipitation Climatology Center (GPCC) [38] and ERA-15 data [39] have been used to simulate the influence of climate change on water resources in this region.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, most of these studies have used data sets on monthly time scales [9,33,35,36], used daily time steps without correction for short-term simulations [8,16,20,22,37,40,41] or evaluated the performances of different variables associated with multisource gridded data in hydrologic modeling [23,24]. In addition, previous studies focused on evaluation of the precipitation data and neglect the temperature data evaluation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Investigating Alternative Climate Data Sources for Hydrological Simulations in the Upstream of the Amu Darya River

Sidike

Chen

et al. 2016

Water

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Abstract:The main objective of this study is to investigate alternative climate data sources for long-term hydrological modeling. To accomplish this goal, one weather station data set (WSD) and three grid-based data sets including three types of precipitation data and two types of temperature data were selected according to their spatial and temporal details. An accuracy assessment of the grid-based data sets was performed using WSD. Then, the performances of corrected data combination and non-corrected grid-based precipitation and temperature data combinations from multiple sources on simulating river flow in the upstream portion of the Amu Darya River Basin (ADRB) were analyzed using a Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model. The results of the accuracy assessments indicated that all the grid-based data sets underestimated precipitation. The Asian Precipitation Highly Resolved Observational Data Integration Towards the Evaluation of Water Resources (APHRODITE) precipitation data provided the highest accuracy (correlation coefficients (CF) > 0.89, root mean square error (RMSE) < 41.6 mm), followed by the CRUNCEP reanalysis data (a combination of the CRU TS.3.2 data and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) reanalysis data) (CF > 0.5, RMSE < 58.1 mm) and Princeton's Global Meteorological Forcing Dataset (PGMFD) precipitation data (CF > 0.46, RMSE < 62.8 mm). The PGMFD temperature data exhibited a higher accuracy (CF > 0.98, RMSE < 7.1 • C) than the CRUNCEP temperature data (CF > 0.97, RMSE < 4.9 • C). In terms of the simulation performance, the corrected APHRODITE precipitation and PGMFD temperature data provided the best performance. The CF and Nash-Sutcliffe (NSE) coefficients in the calibration and validation periods were 0.96 and 0.92 and 0.93 and 0.83, respectively. In addition, the combinations of PGMFD temperature data and APHRODITE, PGMFD and CRUNCEP precipitation data produced good results, with NSE ≥ 0.70 and CF ≥ 0.89. The combination of CRUNCEP temperature data and APHRODITE precipitation produced a satisfactory result, with NSE = 0.58 and CF = 0.82. The combinations of CRUNCEP temperature data and PGMFD and CRUNCEP precipitation data produced poor results.

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“…A precipitation decrease by 30%, combined with a temperature rise of 1.5 • C, 2 • C, and 4 • C cause a runoff increase by 31.4%, 51.0%, and 151.3% as compared with the average annual runoff of the baseline, respectively (Figure 13, Table 6). With the global warming, glaciers continue to retreat and the area of glaciers is sharply reduced, the retreat of glaciers is bound to cause changes in glacier runoff with glacier melt water as its supply source [43]. In order to study the influence of glacier area change on runoff depth, the sensitivity of runoff depth to changes of glacier area in the LHGB was carried out.…”

Section: Sensitivity Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Simulation of Runoff and Glacier Mass Balance and Sensitivity Analysis in a Glacierized Basin, North-Eastern Qinhai-Tibetan Plateau, China

Zhang

Qin

et al. 2018

Water

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Glaciers have been recognized as the most sensitive indicators of climate change. Mountainous areas, with their characteristic snow and glacier cover, have long been recognized as special hydrological environments, receiving above-average amounts of precipitation. The streams originating in the mountains, nourished with distinct seasonal variations, provide water for the populations of the adjacent lowland. Little is known about the effect of climate change on snow and glacier hydrology and glacier mass balance in the Laohugou Glacier Basin (LHGB) over the past 50 years. A study of the glacier basin was performed to quantify the expected impact of climate change on the hydrology in the north-eastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. The DEM (Digital Elevation Model) data, daily temperature, daily precipitation, and evaporation data were applied to force the HBV (Hydrologiska Byrans Vattenbalansavdelning)-light conceptual model to simulate runoff depth and glacier mass balance in the historical period (1959–2015). A genetic calibration algorithm approach (GAP method) was used to obtain parameter sets that reproduced observed runoff depth well. The results suggested a drastic increase of the runoff depth from 1995 to 2015 in the Laohugou glacier basin driven by increased temperature. Temperature and precipitation increased by 0.40 °C (10a)−1 and 1.6 mm·a−1 (p < 0.01), respectively, at AWS1 (the automatic weather station at 4192 m a.s.l. near the hydrological station) in the LHGB from 1959 to 2015. The simulated runoff depth increased at 5.7 mm·a−1 (p < 0.01), the glacier mass balance (GMB) of the LHGB was −280.5 mm·a−1, and the overall glacier mass balance was −17.55 m w.e. from 1959 to 2015. The runoff is found to be more sensitive to the variation of temperature than the variation of precipitation. When the glacier area is decreased by 10%, 53%, and 100%, the peak runoff (July) decreased by 20.4%, 54.2%, and 72.3% relative to the baseline, respectively. In the future climate, the function of glaciers in compensating a potential low flow and regulating peak flow will be weakened in the critical months.

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The Impact of Climate Change on the Water Resources of the Amu Darya Basin in Central Asia

Cited by 91 publications

References 27 publications

A Drought Reconstruction from the Low-Elevation Juniper Forest of Northwestern Kyrgyzstan since CE 1565

A Drought Reconstruction from the Low-Elevation Juniper Forest of Northwestern Kyrgyzstan since CE 1565

Investigating Alternative Climate Data Sources for Hydrological Simulations in the Upstream of the Amu Darya River

Simulation of Runoff and Glacier Mass Balance and Sensitivity Analysis in a Glacierized Basin, North-Eastern Qinhai-Tibetan Plateau, China

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