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Assessment of Climate Change Impacts on River High Flows through Comparative Use of GR4J, HBV and Xinanjiang Models

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Abstract

This study analyses the extreme high flows in Jinhua River basin under the impact of climate change for the near future 2011–2040. The objective of this study is to investigate the effect of using the bias corrected RCM outputs as input on the extreme flows by hydrological models. The future projections are obtained through the PRECIS model with resolution of 50 km × 50 km under climate scenario A1B. The daily precipitation from the PRECIS is bias corrected by distribution based scaling method. Afterwards, three hydrological models (GR4J, HBV and Xinanjiang) are calibrated and applied to simulate the daily discharge in the future. The hydrological models are driven with both bias corrected precipitation and raw precipitation from the PRECIS model for 2011–2040. It is found that after bias correction, the amount, frequency, intensity and variance of the precipitation from the regional climate model resemble the observation better. For the three hydrological models, the simulated annual maximum discharges are higher by using the raw precipitation from PRECIS than by bias corrected precipitation at any return period. Meanwhile, the uncertainties from different models cannot be neglected. The largest difference between three models is about 2,100 m3/s.

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Acknowledgments

This study is financially supported by the International Science and Technology Cooperation Program of China (Project No. 2010DFA24320) and the Nature Science Foundation of China (Project No. 50809058). Other supports from Met Office Hadley Centre, UK, Bureau of Hydrology, Zhejiang Province, and Nanjing Hydraulic Research Institute are highly acknowledged. Finally, many thanks are given to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

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  1. Department of Civil Engineering, Institute of Hydrology and Water Resources, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China, 310058

    Ye Tian, Yue-Ping Xu & Xu-Jie Zhang

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Tian, Y., Xu, YP. & Zhang, XJ. Assessment of Climate Change Impacts on River High Flows through Comparative Use of GR4J, HBV and Xinanjiang Models. Water Resour Manage 27, 2871–2888 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-013-0321-4

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