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The Impact of Future Climate Change and Human Activities on Hydro-climatological Drought, Analysis and Projections: Using CMIP5 Climate Model Simulations

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Abstract

Both climate change and human activity are the important drivers that can change hydrological cycle routs and affect the features of hydrological drought in river basins. The current study selects the Zayandeh Rud river Basin as a case study region in which to evaluate the influences of climate alteration and human activity on meteorological and hydrological drought based on the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Standardized Runoff Index (SRI) on different time scales. The generated local climatic data of future years (2006–2040), (2041–2075) and (2076–2100) under the severest scenario (RCP 8.5) from the CMIP5 climate model are selected and used for the hydrology model and water allocation model of WEAP to construct hydrological drought which also consider human activities. The results indicate that significant meteorological drought is expected to occur in the winter and spring months of January to June. However, the driest month for hydrological drought is in the summer and autumn (July to December) (e.g. no changes in seasonality of droughts compared to historic period). It is concluded that, in the results of this work, the human influences on projected hydrological drought have been outlined; they had been missed in many projections for future hydrological drought. However, this study confirms the previous study (Bierkens et al. 2012) which mentioned that human influences can account for future hydrological drought in areas of Asia, the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The results attained in this study are beneficial for examining how hydrological drought characterizations respond to climate alteration and human activity on several time scales, thereby providing scientific information for drought predicting and water resources management over various time scales under non-stationary circumstances.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Water Resource Management Department, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, B152TT, UK.

Funding

We thank the Esfahan Regional Water Authority for funding this study to collect the necessary data easily and helped the authors to collect the necessary data without payment and Mohammad Abdollahi and Hamid Zakeri for their helpful contributions to collect the data. All other sources of funding for the research collected from authors. We thank Forough Jafary who provided professional services for checking the grammar of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Water Resource Management Department, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B152 TT, UK

    Safieh Javadinejad

  2. School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK

    David Hannah & Stefane Krause

  3. Department of Civil Engineering, Najafabad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Najafabad, 8514143131, Iran

    Kaveh Ostad-Ali-Askari

  4. Department of Civil Engineering, Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, 81595-158, Iran

    Kaveh Ostad-Ali-Askari

  5. European Regional Centre for Ecohydrology PAS, 3 Tylna str, 90-364, Łódź, Poland

    Maciej Zalewski

  6. NoorderRuimte, Centre of Applied Research and Innovation on Area Development, Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Zernikeplein 7, P.O. Box 3037, 9701 DA, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Floris Boogaard

  7. Global Center on Adaptation, Energy Academy Europe, Nijenborgh 6, 9747 AG, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Floris Boogaard

Authors
  1. Safieh Javadinejad
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  2. David Hannah
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  4. Stefane Krause
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  5. Maciej Zalewski
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  6. Floris Boogaard
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All authors designed this research and they wrote this paper and they collected the necessary data and they did analysis of the data.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kaveh Ostad-Ali-Askari.

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Ethical Statement

This study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Water Resource Management Governance Institute and Ministry of Energy (in Iran), and the protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee.

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Javadinejad, S., Hannah, D., Ostad-Ali-Askari, K. et al. The Impact of Future Climate Change and Human Activities on Hydro-climatological Drought, Analysis and Projections: Using CMIP5 Climate Model Simulations. Water Conserv Sci Eng 4, 71–88 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41101-019-00069-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41101-019-00069-2

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