Estimating the Responses of Hydrological and Sedimental Processes to Future Climate Change in Watersheds with Different Landscapes in the Yellow River Basin, China

Abstract

This study concerned the sediment issue of the Yellow River basin. The responses of hydrological and sedimental processes to future climate change in two upland watersheds with different dominant landscapes were estimated. Four Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios with different radiative forcing levels were considered. The outputs of eleven Global Climate Models (GCMs) were used to represent the future climate status of the 2050s and 2070s, and an ensemble means was achieved to avoid uncertainty. The Long Ashton Research Station Weather Generator (LARS-WG) was employed to downscale the outputs of GCMs for future site-scale daily weather data estimations. The Generalized Watershed Loading Functions (GWLF) model was employed to model the streamflow and sediment yields under various scenarios and periods. The results showed that there would be generally hotter and wetter weather conditions in the future. Increased erosion and sediment yields could be found in the study area, with lesser increments in sediment in woodland than in cultivated field. The peak of sediment would appear in the 2050s, and integrated measures for sediment control should be implemented to reduce erosion and block delivery. The multi-model approach proposed in this study had reliable performance and could be applied in other similar areas with modest data conditions.

Estimation of Watershed Hydrochemical Responses to Future Climate Changes Based on CMIP6 Scenarios in the Tianhe River (China)

“…The results of the K-S tests show that there was no significant difference between the distributions of the daily observed and modeled series for all weather factors. The t-test and F-test results show that the means and variances of the monthly observed series and synthetic series were in good agreement, if a little poorer than the corresponding daily outputs, and comparable with the level of agreement in other model applications [56,59,60]. Most monthly results had no significant differences between the observed and modeled values at the 5% significance level, except the F-test of monthly precipitation variance in September.…”

The impacts of climate changes on watershed streamflow and total dissolved nitrogen in Danjiang Watershed, China

“…The GWLF/ReNuMa model performed well in estimating the yields and source apportionments of watershed streamflows and pollution fluxes (Hu et al 2018;Liu et al 2018). Based on various scenario analyses, the valid GWLF/ReNuMa model can be used to support best management practices (Qi et al 2020) and estimate the impacts of possible climate change on watershed hydrochemical processes (Li et al 2019;Sha et al 2021b). In this study, we used GWLF to model the hydrochemical processes of SDRW to estimate the monthly/annual streamflow and TDN loads in the present and future.…”