Responses of hydrological processes to climate change in the Yarlung Zangbo River basin

ABSTRACT

Climate change alters hydrological processes and results in more extreme hydrological events, e.g. flooding and drought, which threaten human livelihoods. In this study, the large-scale distributed variable infiltration capacity (VIC) model was used to simulate future hydrological processes in the Yarlung Zangbo River basin (YZRB), China, with a combination of the CMIP5 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, fifth phase) and MIROC5 (Model for Interdisciplinary Research on Climate, fifth version) datasets. The results indicate that the performance of the VIC model is suitable for the case study, and the variation in runoff is remarkably consistent with that of precipitation, which exhibits a decreasing trend for the period 2046–2060 and an increasing trend for 2086–2100. The seasonality of runoff is evident, and substantial increases are projected for spring runoff, which might result from the increase in precipitation as well as the increase in the warming-induced melting of snow, glaciers and frozen soil. Moreover, evapotranspiration exhibits an increase between 2006–2020 and 2046–2060 over the entire basin, and soil moisture decreases in upstream areas and increases in midstream and downstream areas. For 2086–2100, both evapotranspiration and soil moisture increase slightly in the upstream and midstream areas and decrease slightly in the downstream area. The findings of this study could provide references for runoff forecasting and ecological protection for similar studies in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• hydrological processes
• climate change
• VIC
• Yarlung Zangbo River basin

Editor A. Castellarin Guest editor Y. Chen

Editor A. Castellarin Guest editor Y. Chen

Acknowledgements

The authors extend their thanks to the reviewers for their careful comments which helped to improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/projects/cmip5/.

² http://westdc.westgis.ac.cn.

³ http://www.landcover.org/data/landcover/data.shtml.

⁴ http://data.cma.cn/.

⁵ https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar5/.

⁶ http://github.com/UW-Hydro/VIC.

Additional information

Funding

This study is financially supported by the State Key Program of the Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) [91647202]. We fully acknowledge the support received from the Open Fund Research project by the State Key Laboratory of Hydraulics and Mountain River Engineering (Sichuan University) [SKHL1709].