Abstract
Communities are facing severe water stress due to the rapid development of agriculture and industry, climate change, as well as population growth. Climate variability has a big impact on runoff variation and it is important to understand these hydrological responses. Using a water balance model, monthly discharges of 21 climatically different catchments in China were simulated. Sensitivities of runoff to climate change were investigated by adopting hypothetical climate scenarios. Results indicate that the water balance model performs well for monthly discharge simulations of climatically different catchments with Nash–Sutcliffe coefficients >65 % and relative errors falling in the range of ±5 %. In general, runoff in arid north China are more sensitive to climate change than those in humid south China. A 1 °C rise in temperature would probably lead to 1.2–4.4 % decreases in runoff. A decrease in precipitation of 10 % would result in 9.4–17.4 % of decreases in runoff. It is essential to consider the implications of climate change in future water resources management.
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Acknowledgments
This study has been supported financially by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 41371063, 41330854), the National Basic Research Program on Global Change of China (Grant 2010CB951103), and the International Science & Technology Cooperation Program of China (Grant No. 2014DFA71910), and thanks also to the anonymous reviewers and editors.
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Wang, G., Zhang, J., He, R. et al. Runoff sensitivity to climate change for hydro-climatically different catchments in China. Stoch Environ Res Risk Assess 31, 1011–1021 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-016-1218-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-016-1218-6