Abstract ▼ AI-Helper

The main purpose of this study is to suggest and evaluate an operational method for assessing the potential impact of climate change on hydrologic components and water resources of regional scale river basins. The method, which uses large scale climate change information provided by a state of the a...

The main purpose of this study is to suggest and evaluate an operational method for assessing the potential impact of climate change on hydrologic components and water resources of regional scale river basins. The method, which uses large scale climate change information provided by a state of the art general circulation model(GCM) comprises a statistical downscaling approach and a spatially distributed hydrological model applied to a river basin located in Korea. First, we construct global climate change scenarios using the YONU GCM control run and transient experiments, then transform the YONU GCM grid-box predictions with coarse resolution of climate change into the site-specific values by statistical downscaling techniques. The values are used to modify the parameters of the stochastic weather generator model for the simulation of the site-specific daily weather time series. The weather series fed into a semi-distributed hydrological model called SLURP to simulate the streamflows associated with other water resources for the condition of $2CO_2$. This approach is applied to the Yongdam dam basin in southern part of Korea. The results show that under the condition of $2CO_2$, about $7.6\% of annual mean streamflow is reduced when it is compared with the observed one. And while Seasonal streamflows in the winter and autumn are increased, a streamflow in the summer is decreased. However, the seasonality of the simulated series is similar to the observed pattern and the analysis of the duration cure shows the mean of averaged low flow is increased while the averaged wet and normal flow are decreased for the climate change.