Hydrological Modeling to Evaluate Future Climate Change Impacts in Sind River Basin, India

Abstract

This research work aims to assess the impact of future climate change on water resources availability in Sind river basin, India using Hydrological model SWAT. Future climate projections under PRECIS RCM generated outputs with IPCC SRES A1B Scenarios have been used. Model calibration and validation has been carried out with average mean monthly stream flow observations recorded at three gauge stations (Pachauli, Seondha and Bhind). First thirteen years (1987-99) stream flow observations have been used for calibration with a initial 3 years (1987-89) data as warm up period then calibrated for next 10 years and model has been validated for the consequent 6 years (2000-05) with measured values. The model simulations with evaluation statistics shows a very good performance of stream flow predictions with R2 values ranged from 0.83 - 0.92, NSE from 0.81- 0.89 and PBIAS from -12.08 to -24.19 for the observed and simulated values of stream flow during calibration and validation. Results show that evapotranspiration (ET) across the Sind river basin is increasing from baseline to mid century (5%) and to end century (6%) and the increase in precipitation in end century (18%) indicates that more extreme high intensity events may be expected due to climate change.