Dominant climatic factor driving annual runoff change at catchments scale over China

Abstract

With global climate changes intensifying, the hydrological response to climate changes has attracted more attentions. It is beneficial not only for hydrology and ecology but also for water resources planning and management to reveal the impacts of climate change on runoff. It is of great significance of climate elasticity of runoff to estimate the impacts of climatic factors on runoff. In addition, there are large spatial variations in climate type and geography characteristics over China. To get a better understanding the spatial variation of runoff response to climate variables change and detect the dominant climatic factor driving annual runoff change, we chose the climate elasticity method proposed by Yang and Yang (2011), where the impact of the catchment characteristics on runoff was represented by a parameter n. The results show that the dominant climatic factor driving annual runoff is precipitation in the most part of China, net radiation in the lower reach of Yangtze River Basin, the Pearl River Basin, the Huai River Basin and the southeast area, and wind speed in part of the northeast China.