Using the UKCP09 probabilistic scenarios to model the amplified impact of climate change on drainage basin sediment yield

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Abstract

Precipitation intensities and the frequency of extreme events are projected to increase under climate change. These rainfall changes will lead to increases in the magnitude and frequency of flood events that will, in turn, affect patterns of erosion and deposition within river basins. These geomorphic changes to river systems may affect flood conveyance, infrastructure resilience, channel pattern, and habitat status as well as sediment, nutrient and carbon fluxes. Previous research modelling climatic influences on geomorphic changes has been limited by how climate variability and change are represented by downscaling from global or regional climate models. Furthermore, the non-linearity of the climatic, hydrological and geomorphic systems involved generate large uncertainties at each stage of the modelling process creating an uncertainty "cascade". This study integrates state-of-the-art approaches from the climate change and geomorphic communities to address these issues in a probabilistic modelling study of the Swale catchment, UK. The UKCP09 weather generator is used to simulate hourly rainfall for the baseline and climate change scenarios up to 2099, and used to drive the CAESAR landscape evolution model to simulate geomorphic change. Results show that winter rainfall is projected to increase, with larger increases at the extremes. The impact of the increasing rainfall is amplified through the translation into catchment runoff and in turn sediment yield with a 100% increase in catchment mean sediment yield predicted between the baseline and the 2070-2099 High emissions scenario. Significant increases are shown between all climate change scenarios and baseline values. Analysis of extreme events also shows the amplification effect from rainfall to sediment delivery with even greater amplification associated with higher return period events. Furthermore, for the 2070-2099 High emissions scenario, sediment discharges from 50-yr return period events are predicted to be 5 times larger than baseline values. © Author(s) 2012.

Figures

  • Fig. 1. The catchment of the River Swale, Yorkshire, UK.
  • Fig. 2. Hydrographs (a) and histograms (b) from five baseline climate simulations (in grey), and observed discharge (in black). Histogram bin sizes for (b) are 50.
  • Fig. 3. Cumulative daily sediment outputs for all runs of 2010–2039, 2040–2069 and 2070–2099 (vertically) periods for the Low, Medium and High emissions scenarios (horizontally). Daily mean cumulative sediment is plotted as a red line, and daily standard deviation as cyan shading. For each time slice, the baseline climate, 1961–1990, results are plotted in the first panel for comparison.
  • Table 1. Comparison of sediment totals using Student’s t-test, with p-values adjusted for multiple comparisons (Holm, 1979). Significant differences (p ≤ 0.05) are in bold.
  • Fig. 4. Box plot showing the distribution of total sediment over 100 30-yr runs using different UKCP09 WG CFs for the 2010–2039, 2040–2069 and 2070–2099 time slices for the Low, Medium and High emissions scenarios. The baseline climate (1961–1990) is shown in white in the left hand panel; the variability in these simulations comes from stochastic variability alone.
  • Fig. 5. Frequency plots of daily sediment totals from all nine climate change scenarios (in black), shown against results for the baseline climate, 1961–1990 (in grey). Bin sizes are 100 000.
  • Fig. 6. Mean daily precipitation and 5th and 95th percentiles from the 100 30-yr simulations for the Low, Medium, and High emissions scenarios and three time periods 2010–2029 (in cyan), 2040–2069 (in dark blue), 2070–2099 (in pink), and baseline (in black).
  • Table 2. Percentiles of the annual maximum distribution for the baseline and 9 future scenarios for (a) daily rainfall (mm), (b) discharge (m3 s−1) and (c) total sediment yield (m3).

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CITATION STYLE

APA

Coulthard, T. J., Ramirez, J., Fowler, H. J., & Glenis, V. (2012). Using the UKCP09 probabilistic scenarios to model the amplified impact of climate change on drainage basin sediment yield. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 16(11), 4401–4416. https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-16-4401-2012

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