Impacts of climate change and human activities on the water discharge and sediment load of the Pearl River, southern China

Wang, Xing; Cai, Shuqun; Ni, Peitong; Zhan, Weikang

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-73939-8

Cited by 52 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 41 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…However, the sediment load exhibited a significant decreasing trend since the 1990s, regardless of the water discharge. Dam construction in the drainage basin is the main reason for the drastic reduction in sediment load 20 , 22 , 23 , 37 . Statistics indicate that over 9000 dams and reservoirs have been constructed in the Pearl River Basin since the 1950s.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It should be noted that LD, the largest dam in the Pearl River Basin, was constructed in 2006 with a storage capacity of 29.9 × 10 9 m 3 . According to the Mann–Kendall test analysis, Wei et al (2020) suggested that the abrupt change in sediment load during this period occurred in 1998 23 . The linear regression equations for annual sediment load suggest a decrease of 178 × 10 4 t/year from 1998 to 2018.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, with the implementation of the national reform and opening policy in the 1980s, the population and economy of the Pearl River Basin began to develop rapidly. Human activities, including dam construction in the river basin 20 – 23 , land reclamation, channel dredging, and sand extraction in the estuary 24 – 26 , have greatly accelerated in the Pearl River Basin and the PRE. Consequently, the natural changes in the sediment load from the river and the morphological evolution of the estuary have been severely disturbed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Impact of anthropogenic activities on morphological and deposition flux changes in the Pearl River Estuary, China

Wang

Cai

Zhan

2021

Sci Rep

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The evolution of the Pearl River Estuary (PRE), China in recent decades has been dominated by human activities. Historical admiralty charts and remote sensing images indicated that from 1936 to 2017, the tidal flat area and water area decreased by 23.6 × 107 m2 and 60.7 × 107 m2, respectively. The average advancing rate of the coastline of the PRE to the sea from 1972 to 2017 reached approximately 64.8 m/year, which is several times or even dozens of times that since the mid-Holocene. Land reclamation was the main reason for the dramatic changes in the water area and coastline. Although the water volume of the PRE showed a decreasing trend from 1936 to 2017, the water volume reduction rates for 1996–2005 and 2005–2017 were only 29% (1.27 × 107 m3/year) and 12% (0.53 × 107 m3/year), respectively, of that for 1936–1972. The combined influences of channel dredging, sand mining, and sediment load reduction caused by dam construction have contributed to this change. From the perspective of the filling up of the estuary, channel dredging, sand mining, and dam construction in the river basin are beneficial for prolonging the life of the estuary.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Impact of anthropogenic activities on morphological and deposition flux changes in the Pearl River Estuary, China

Wang

Cai

Zhan

2021

Sci Rep

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Damaging hydrological events triggered by either short and intense storms, or longer duration rainfall (e.g., Diodato et al, 2020b;Duulatov et al, 2021), cause sustained erosive forcing and considerable soil losses in many parts of the world (Wuepper et al, 2020). They may increase in frequency and/or severity with changes in the climate system associated with global warming (Easterling et al, 2000;Morera et al, 2017;Harris et al, 2018;Rineau et al, 2019;Wei et al, 2020). Understanding the dynamics and current developments of climate extremes (e.g., Garcia-Herrera et al, 2014) with rainfall erosivity pose significant challenges for quantifying their impact on landscapes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate Patterns in the World’s Longest History of Storm-Erosivity: The Arno River Basin, Italy, 1000–2019 CE

Diodato¹,

Ljungqvist

Bellocchi

2021

Front. Earth Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Rainfall erosivity causes considerable environmental damage by driving soil loss. However, the long-term evolution of erosive forcing (over centennial to millennial time-scales) remains essentially unknown. Using a rainfall erosivity model (REMARB), this study simulates the variability of rainfall erosivity in Arno River Basin (ARB), Italy, a Mediterranean fluvial basin, for the period 1000–2019 CE resulting in the world’s longest time-series of erosivity. The annual estimates show a noticeable and increasing variability of rainfall erosivity during the Little Ice Age (∼1250–1849), especially after c. 1490, until the end of 18th century. During this cold period, erosive forcing reached ∼1600 MJ mm hm−2 h−1 yr−1 once every four years, and ∼3000 MJ mm hm−2 h−1 yr−1 once every 20 years. The extremes of rainfall erosivity (the 98th percentile) followed a similar increasing trend, with an acceleration of the hydrological hazard (erosivity per unit of rainfall) during the 20th century. The comparison of REMARB output with the sediment yield of the basin (1951–2010) confirmed the model’s ability to predict geomorphological effects in the ARB. Thus, our methodology could be applied to simulate erosivity in environmentally similar basins. A relationship has been identified between the Atlantic Multidecadal Variation and erosivity patterns, suggesting a role of North Atlantic circulation dynamics on the hydrology of central Italy’s fluvial basins.

show abstract

“…The water quality management and biodiversity protection functions are strongly affected by the hydrological exchange flows (Harvey, 2016) that are driven by hydrostatic pressure and flow-sediment induced dynamic pressure (Tonina and Buffington, 2007;Cardenas and Wilson, 2007). As the magnitude, frequency, and peak time of discharge are projected to vary with future climate and anthropogenic conditions (Potter et al, 2004;Veldkamp et al, 2018;Wei et al, 2020;Xu et al, 2021), it is essential to establish a numerical modeling framework that enables evaluating and predicting the impact of climate-or human-induced discharge variations on streamflow and river functions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling of streamflow in a 30-kilometer-long reach spanning 5 years using OpenFOAM 5.x

Chen

Bao

Fang

et al. 2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. Developing accurate and efficient modeling techniques for streamflow at tens-kilometer spatial scale and multi-year temporal scale is critical for evaluating and predicting the impact of climate- and human-induced discharge variations on river hydrodynamics. However, achieving such a goal is challenging because of limited surveys of streambed hydraulic roughness, uncertain boundary condition specifications, and high computational costs. We demonstrate that accurate and efficient three-dimensional (3D) hydrodynamic modeling of natural rivers at 30-kilometer and 5-year scales is feasible using the following three techniques within OpenFOAM, an open source computational fluid dynamics platform: 1) generating a distributed hydraulic roughness field for the streambed by integrating water stage observation data, a rough wall theory, and a local roughness optimization and adjustment strategy; 2) prescribing the boundary condition for the inflow and outflow by integrating pre-computed results of a one-dimensional (1D) hydraulic model with the 3D model; and 3) reducing computational time using multiple parallel runs constrained by 1D inflow and outflow boundary conditions. Streamflow modeling for a 30-kilometer-long reach in the Columbia River (CR) over 58 months can be achieved in less than six days using 1.1 million CPU hours. The mean error between the modeled and the observed water stages for our simulated CR reach ranges from −16 cm to 9 cm (equivalent to ca. ±7 % relative to the average water depth) at seven locations during most of the years between 2011 and 2019. We can reproduce the velocity distribution measured by the acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP). The correlation coefficients of the depth-averaged velocity between the model and ADCP measurements are in the range between 0.71 and 0.83 at 75 % of the survey cross-sections. With the validated model, we further show that the relative importance of dynamic pressure versus hydrostatic pressure varies with discharge variations and topography heterogeneity. Given the model's high accuracy and computational efficiency, the model framework provides a generic approach to evaluate and predict the impact of climate- and human-induced discharge variations on river hydrodynamics at tens kilometer and decade scales.

show abstract

Impacts of climate change and human activities on the water discharge and sediment load of the Pearl River, southern China

Cited by 52 publications

References 41 publications

Impact of anthropogenic activities on morphological and deposition flux changes in the Pearl River Estuary, China

Impact of anthropogenic activities on morphological and deposition flux changes in the Pearl River Estuary, China

Climate Patterns in the World’s Longest History of Storm-Erosivity: The Arno River Basin, Italy, 1000–2019 CE

Modeling of streamflow in a 30-kilometer-long reach spanning 5 years using OpenFOAM 5.x

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About