Abstract
Quantifying the impacts caused by climate change and anthropogenic intervention on runoff is necessary for defining different adaptation strategies to climate change and understanding the future pattern of water and soil use for different human activities. Based on this rationale, this study proposes to associate the dynamics of flow variability in the São Francisco River catchment with that of climatic and anthropic covariates, by utilizing the Budyko framework and the decomposition method. Our results suggested that streamflow decreased in about 183 mm, 56 mm and 26 mm in the upper, middle and lower portions of the catchment, respectively. Climate change is the most prominent factor in the upstream region (75%, 43% and 42%), but the influence of human activities becomes more pronounced in the downstream areas (27%, 57% and 58%). However, as the drainage areas increase, model performance deteriorates, which introduces higher levels of bias and uncertainty to the attribution results.
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Data Availability
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the support to this research from CNPq (“Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico”) and from CAPES (“Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior”). The authors also acknowledge the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their valuable comments and suggestions, which greatly helped improve the paper.
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This work was supported by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico – Brazil (CNPq) and Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brazil (CAPES).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation and data collection was performed by Larissa S Melo, and analysis were performed by all authors. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Veber A F Costa and Wilson S Fernandes and all authors commented on it.
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Melo, L.S., Costa, V.A.F. & Fernandes, W.S. Assessing the Anthropogenic and Climatic Components in Runoff Changes of the São Francisco River Catchment. Water Resour Manage 37, 3615–3629 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-023-03516-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-023-03516-x