Evaluation climate change impacts on water resources over the upper reach of the Yellow River Basin

Abstract

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 November; (ii) there would also be more precipitation in future with the increments can reach more than 200 mm in July in 2030s; (iii) More streamflow rates may be expected in most months except November mainly due to precipitation increments. The future monthly streamflow can reach around 2000 m2/s in July and August in future, which nearly doubled the flow rates in the historical periods.