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Assessing the impact of climate change on flood in an alpine catchment using multiple hydrological models

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Abstract

A growing number of studies on streamflow projection in the context of global climate change have been widely reported in past years. However, current knowledge on the role of different hydrological models to estimate future climate impact on flood in the Tibet Plateau is still limited so far. In this work, a group of hydrological models in conjunction with statistical downscaling outputs (SDSM and ANN) from the HadCM3 GCM model are used to evaluate the impacts of climate change on floods in the 21st century over the headwater catchment of Yellow River, the Tibet Plateau. The influence of different hydrological models on flood projection and quantile estimation are addressed. The results show that: (1) three hydrological models generate acceptable results of flood magnitude and frequency at Tangnaihai station during the past 50 years; (2) quite similar projections for future floods are obtained by means of different hydrological models, decreasing flood magnitude corresponding to the 2-, 5-, 10- and 50-year return periods is found under most scenarios in the 21st century. Meanwhile, flood frequency is likely to reduce in response to climate change; (3) the uncertainty in projected flood quantile by three different hydrological models increases with recurrence interval in term of relative length of confidence interval (RL). Besides, RL for flood quantile in future climate scenarios is likely to become larger than the baseline period. The results are valuable to improve our current knowledge of climate impact research in the alpine regions.

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Acknowledgments

The work was supported by a grant from the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2013BAC10B01), a key grant of Chinese Academy of Sciences (KZZD-EW-12), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2014B02614,2013B24914) and the Research and Innovation Program for University graduate student in Jiangsu Province of China (KYLX_0465).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Hydrology-Water Resources and Hydraulic Engineering, Center for Global Change and Water Cycle, Hohai University, Nanjing, 210098, People’s Republic of China

    Xiaoyan Wang, Tao Yang & Zhongbo Yu

  2. State Key Laboratory of Desert and Oasis Ecology, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ürümqi, China

    Tao Yang

  3. Research Domain II: Climate Impacts and Vulnerabilities, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, P.O. Box 601203, Telegrafenberg, 14412, Potsdam, Germany

    Valentina Krysanova

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  1. Xiaoyan Wang
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  4. Zhongbo Yu
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Correspondence to Tao Yang.

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Wang, X., Yang, T., Krysanova, V. et al. Assessing the impact of climate change on flood in an alpine catchment using multiple hydrological models. Stoch Environ Res Risk Assess 29, 2143–2158 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-015-1062-0

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