Impacts of climate and land‐cover changes on water resources in a humid subtropical watershed: a case study from East Texas, USA

Abstract

This study investigates the response of water resources regarding the climate and land‐cover changes in a humid subtropical watershed during the period 1970–2009. A 0.7°C increase in temperature and a 16.3% increase in precipitation were observed. Temperature had a lower increase trend, and precipitation showed definite increasing trend compared to previous studies. The main trend of land‐cover change was conversion of vegetation and barren lands to developed and crop lands affected by human intervention, and forest and grass to bush/shrub which considered to be caused by natural climate system. Hydrologic responses to climate and land‐cover changes resulted in increases of surface run‐off (15.0%), soil water content (2.7%), evapotranspiration (20.1%) and a decrease in groundwater discharge (9.2%). We found that surface run‐off is relatively stable with precipitation, whereas groundwater discharge and soil water content are sensitive to changes in land cover, especially land cover brought about by human intervention.

Climate Change Impact on the Tuul River Flow in a Semiarid Region in Mongolia

“…A previous study shows that air temperature and precipitation show a significant upward trend, but river flow shows an insignificant change in arid and semiarid regions (Kong and Pang, 2014). In humid regions, river flow is sensitive to changes in precipitation and temperature (Mishra and Lilhare, 2016), and flow increases along with a rise in temperature and precipitation (Heo et al, 2014). In this case, a warming of air temperature and a reduction in precipitation occur at the same time during the latest dry period.…”

“…Compagnucci et al (2001) showed that as a result of climate change, most humid regions probably had an increasing trend in river flow, while most arid and semiarid regions showed a decreasing trend in river flow. Other recent studies have shown that precipitation and temperature in wetter regions are key factors influencing river flow patterns (Heo et al, 2014); while river flow in semiarid and arid regions is strongly influenced by changes in precipitation (Kong and Pang, 2014;Molina-Navarro et al, 2016;Wang et al, 2008). Furthermore, river flow variation in some regions is influenced by large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns associated with teleconnections (Bao et al, 2012;Bates et al, 2008;Davi et al, 2006).…”

How Does the Unique Space‐Time Sampling of the SWOT Mission Influence River Discharge Series Characteristics?

“…Climate change threatens to alter water resources in many regions (Sellami et al, 2016;Tan et al, 2017;Trenberth et al, 2013). Often, discharge distributions are used to determine design capacities for civil infrastructure (Forsee & Ahmad, 2011;Hamlet, 2011) and to help improve hydrologic model performance (Soumya et al, 2016;Sun et al, 2012) for historical, current, and future conditions, considering potential climate and land cover changes (Candela et al, 2012;Heo et al, 2015;Luo et al, 2013;Robles-Morua et al, 2015). Unfortunately, quantifying global river discharges is challenging due to limited in situ gauges in many regions (Hrachowitz et al, 2013;Vörösmarty et al, 2001) and data sharing among international communities (Biancamaria et al, 2011).…”

Water Resources Response to Climate and Land-Cover Changes in a Semi-Arid Watershed, New Mexico, USA

“…The SWAT models were calibrated and validated for the first and second half of each period, respectively. We simulated three SWAT models independently using Isolated-Speciation-based Particle Swarm Optimization (Cho et al 2011), which was successfully applied to a climate change study (Heo et al 2015), uncertainty analysis (Cho and Olivera 2014), and stochastic rainfall generation (Kim et al 2013). Table 2 …”