A modeling framework to assess the impact of climate change on a river runoff

Abstract

Global climate change is anticipated to have consequences on water resources and the envi-ronment both at global and local/regional levels. Efforts towards proper management of future water resources and resolving potential water-related conflicts require the formulation of appropriate techniques to downscale the output of global climate models (GCM) to local conditions for hydrologic prediction. The paper presents an integrated framework for modeling the impact of climate change on river runoff that combines methodology for downscaling climate change scenarios for a basin scale with a hydrological model to estimate the impact of climate change on a river runoff. The modeling framework uses long-term observations of meteorological and hydrological variables together with a climate change scenario to provide a projection of future flows for the specified time horizon. The framework is based on a spatial weather generator and a distributed rainfall-runoff model. Such a configuration enables a reflection of the uncertainty of future conditions by running multiple realizations of future conditions, and also take into account the spatial variability of hydrological properties in the catchment by maintaining the physical details at a given grid size.The performance of the framework was presented for the Kaczawa basin that is one of the main left bank tributaries of the Odra River -the second biggest river in Poland. The results show simulated changes of the future river flow regime caused by climatic changes for two time horizons: 2040 and 2080.

Maximum Rainfall Model Based on Archival Pluviographic Records – Case Study for Legnica (Poland)

“…Simulation studies of functioning of the storm water drainage with accompanying facilities, such as storm water overflows [19,48], separators and reservoirs are becoming essential tools for use in engineering practice [32,35,36]. In recent years, many studies have focused on the assessment of the reliability and risks associated with the functioning of urban infrastructure systems [5,14,22,42,43,50], as well as the impact of changes climate for their functioning [16,21,23,25,28,29,37,41].…”

Assessing the impact of socio-economic development and climate change on faecal indicator bacteria in the Betna River, Bangladesh

“…Process based modelling has recently been frequently applied to understand hydrodynamics of a basin and to assess the future flood potential , Kuchar and Iwański, 2014, Apurv et al, 2015, Ghosh and Dutta, 2012. However, these studies were based on mainly two climate change parameters (temperature and precipitation) and outputs of those studies were on river flows and floods.…”

“…However, changes in socio-economic conditions are often not adequately incorporated in such climate change impact assessment studies (Berkhout et al, 2002). Some studies focused only on impacts on river hydrodynamic characteristics due to future climate changes ignoring socio-economic changes (Kuchar and Iwański, 2014, Elshemy and Khadr, 2015, Liu and Chan, 2015. Some studies assessed the future impacts of climate change and socio-economic changes on water flow or nutrient flux, but no study focused on microbial water quality .…”

“…Some studies focused on assessing the impacts of only climate change on river hydrodynamic characteristics (Elshemy andKhadr, 2015, Kuchar andIwański, 2014) or waterborne pathogens/FIB (Jalliffier-Verne et al, 2016, Rankinen et al, 2016, Liu and Chan, 2015, Sterk et al, 2016 without considering socio-economic changes (i.e. the SSPs).…”

“…Process based modelling is often performed to understand hydrodynamics of a basin and to assess the effectiveness of future flood protection infrastructure (Jin et al, 2015, Kuchar andIwański, 2014).Few modelling and climate change studies occurred in South-Asian river basins , Ghosh and Dutta, 2012, Apurv et al, 2015. These studies were based on mainly two climate-change parameters (temperature and precipitation) and reported that climate change (increased temperature and monsoon precipitation) will likely impact river flows and therefore increases in future floods are very likely in this region.…”