“…There are several approaches to investigate the impacts of annual runoff on climate change, including hydrologic models (Yang et al, 1998;Arnold et al, 1998;Yang et al, 2000;Arnold and Fohrer, 2005), the climate elasticity method (Schaake, 1990;Sankarasubramanian et al, 2001), and the statistics method (Vogel et al, 1999). The climate elasticity method, which has the advantage of requiring only the mean and trend of climate and basin variables and not requiring extensive historical measurements, was widely used in quantifying the effects of climatic factors on runoff, such as in the Yellow River basin (Zheng et al, 2009;Yang and Yang, 2011), the Luan River basin (Xu et al, 2013), the Chao-Bai River basin (Ma et al, 2010), and the Hai River basin (Ma et al, 2008;Yang and Yang, 2011).…”