Assessing the Climate Change Impacts on Agricultural Reservoirs using the SWAT model and CMIP5 GCMs

Abstract

The study aimed to project inflows and demmands for the agricultural reservoir watersheds in South Korea considering a variety of regional characteristics and the uncertainty of future climate information. The study bias-corrected and spatially downscaled retrospective daily Global Climate Model (GCM) outputs under Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) 4.5 and 8.5 emission scenarios using non-parametric quantile mapping method to force Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model. Using the historical simulation, the skills of un-calibrated SWAT model (without calibration process) was evaluated for 5 reservoir watersheds (selected as well-monitored representatives). The study then, evaluated the performance of 9 GCMs in reproducing historical upstream inflow and irrigation demand at the five representative reservoirs. Finally future inflows and demands for 58 watersheds were projected using 9 GCMs projections under the two RCP scenarios. We demonstrated that (1) un-calibrated SWAT model is likely applicable to agricultural watershed, (2) the uncertainty of future climate information from different GCMs is significant, (3) multi-model ensemble (MME) shows comparatively resonable skills in reproducing water balances over the study area. The results of projection under the RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 scenario generally showed the increase of inflow by 9.4% and 10.8% and demand by 1.4% and 1.7%, respectively. More importantly, the results for different seasons and reservoirs varied considerably in the impacts of climate change.