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Comprehensive evaluation of hydrological models for climate change impact assessment in the Upper Yangtze River Basin, China

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Abstract

Climate change has substantial impacts on regional hydrology in the major river basins. To figure out such latent hydrological impacts of changing climate, more reliable hydrological simulations are imperative. In this study, we evaluated the impacts of climate change on hydrological regime in the Upper Yangtze River Basin based on four downscaled and bias-corrected Global Climate Model outputs from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 under four Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6.0, and RCP8.5) driving three hydrological models. Two model evaluation approaches were applied: simple and comprehensive. The comprehensive approach was used to evaluate models in the historical period, optimizing objective function at four gauges, and hydrological models were weighted for impact assessment based on their performance. In such a way, projected streamflow time series are obtained under different emission scenarios. Results show that the annual average discharge is projected to increase by 4.1–10.5% under the RCP scenarios at the end of twenty-first century relative to the reference period (1970–1999). Moreover, the high flow is projected to increase and the low flow to decrease indicating a higher probability of flood and drought occurrence in the basin. The severity of floods and droughts may increase. In comparison with the simple one-site model evaluation approach, the comprehensive method reveals that the anticipated extreme flow events would be less severe, and annual mean discharge slightly lower. The projected results imply that application of the comprehensive model evaluation approach could narrow the simulated spreads of projections significantly, and might provide more credible results.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the ISIMIP modeling group for providing the climate data and methodological guidance.

Funding

This study was jointly supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2017YFA0603701), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42005126), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation funded project (2020M671536), Jiangsu Planned Projects for Postdoctoral Research Funds (2019K096), and High-level Talent Recruitment Program of the Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology (NUIST).

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Author notes

  1. Shanshan Wen, Buda Su and Tong Jiang contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Disaster Risk Management / School of Geographical Science, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China

    Shanshan Wen, Buda Su, Yanjun Wang, Ziyan Chen, Jinlong Huang & Tong Jiang

  2. National Climate Center, China Meteorological Administration, Beijing, 100081, China

    Buda Su & Jianqing Zhai

  3. State Key Laboratory of Desert and Oasis Ecology, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Urumqi, 830011, China

    Buda Su, Anqian Wang & Tong Jiang

  4. Beijing Meteorological Bureau, Beijing, 100089, China

    Hemin Sun

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  1. Shanshan Wen
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Correspondence to Yanjun Wang or Tong Jiang.

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This article is part of a Special Issue on “How evaluation of hydrological models influences results of climate impact assessment", edited by Valentina Krysanova, Fred Hattermann, and Zbigniew Kundzewicz

Shanshan Wen and Buda Su are first authors

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Wen, S., Su, B., Wang, Y. et al. Comprehensive evaluation of hydrological models for climate change impact assessment in the Upper Yangtze River Basin, China. Climatic Change 163, 1207–1226 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-020-02929-6

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