Evaluation Climate Change Impacts on Water Resources Over the Upper Reach of the Yellow River Basin

Abstract

In this study, a climate-streamflow modeling framework (CSF) is advanced to generate future climate projections and assess climate change impacts on water. The proposed CSF incorporates global climate models (GCMs), meteorological factors downscaled by the providing regional climate impacts for studies (PRECIS), and stepwise-clustered hydrological model within a general framework. It has advantages in (1) transferring large scale climate variables from global climate models to high-resolution meteorological datasets by the PRECIS, and (2) quantifying the climate change impacts on streamflow simulation by employing the stepwise cluster analysis method to reflect nonlinear relationships between predictand and predictor. Correspondingly, a real case of streamflow simulation at the upper Yellow River basin is applied to demonstrating the efficiency of the CSF. Results disclose that: (i) an increasing trend of average temperature exists in future with the highest temperature increments happening in December under RCP4.5 and more increments occurring in Summer under RCP8.5; (ii) there would be no visible precipitation changes in future Winter when compared with historical precipitation, while remarkable rainfall reduction may occur in May and June; (iii) compared with historical streamflow rates, the future streamflow would mainly change during May to October in which remarkable streamflow reduction may be observed in May but explicit increases may occur in July.