Climate change and its impacts on streamflow: WRF and SCE-optimized SWAT models

Abstract

It has been noted that global warming is likely to increase both the frequency and severity of weather events such as heat waves and heavy rainfall. These could lead to large scale effects such as melting of large ice sheets with major impacts on low-lying regions throughout the world (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC 2007a). Since these projected climate changes will impact water resources, agriculture, bio-diversity and health, one of the key challenges of climate research is the application of climate models to quantify both future climate change and its impacts on the physical and biological environment. One of the widely studied impacts is on hydrology, right from large scale river basins, river deltas through to small scale urban reservoirs. In this context, this chapter discusses some hydrological impact studies and presents results of a study done over the Sesan catchment in Lower Mekong Basin (in Southeast Asia). Sensitivity analysis and an optimization calibration scheme, SCE-UA algorithm, are applied to the SWAT model.