Impact assessment on water resources management under extreme climate change

Abstract

River flows would be influenced greatly by climate change, which may cause further stress on water resources management by altering the quantity and distribution of runoff. In this paper, taking the Hanjiang River basin for instance, projections of precipitation and temperature are generated from two GCMs under RCP8.5 scenario, an extreme condition. Then the outputs are statistically downscaled and corrected by the daily bias correction method, a hybrid method of combining the daily translation and the local intensity scaling method. The VIC distributed hydrological model is used for the runoff simulation. Results show that the projections of two GCMs consistent with each other. There is a general increase in the annual mean precipitation and temperature in the Hanjiang River Basin in the future period (2021-2099), and the annual mean runoff of the Danjiangkou reservoir increases significantly compared with historical period (1980-2010). However, the annual runoff variability would increase the flood control pressure in wet season, aggravate the conflict between power generation and water supply in dry season despite increasing the water supply capacity in storage season.