Modeling hydrological consequences of 21st-Century climate and land use/land cover changes in a mid-high latitude watershed

Abstract

The Naoli River Basin (NRB), a pivotal agricultural production area in China, is poised to undergo substantial impacts on water resources due to projected climate and land use/cover (LULC) changes. Despite its significance in the context of China's expanding farmland construction in the NRB, there exists limited research on the potential repercussions of future shifts in runoff, soil water content (SWC), and evapotranspiration (ET) on crop productivity and water availability (both in terms of quantity and timing). This study employs future LULC maps and an ensemble of ten CMIP6 Global Climate Models (GCMs) across three scenarios to drive the well-calibrated distributed hydrological model, ESSI-3. The objective of present study is aimed on projecting hydrological consequences under climate and land use/land cover changes in near-term (2026–2050), middle-term (2051–2075), and far-term (2076–2100) future in comparison to the baseline period of 1990–2014. Results consistently indicate an increase trend in annual average ET, runoff, and SWC in the NRB across all three future periods under the three SSP scenarios. LULC changes emerge as the primary driver influencing regional hydrological processes in the near future. Notably, under high-emission scenarios, monthly runoff and SWC are projected to significantly increase in March but decrease in April during the middle and far future periods compared to the baseline. This shift is attributed to the anticipated warming of winter and spring, leading to a transition in peak snowmelt from April to March. Concurrently, the expansion of cropland intensifies crop evapotranspiration demand, potentially exacerbating water stress during the early stages of crop growth in April. The findings underscore the importance of addressing the substantial impacts of climate change and land use planning on regional water cycling processes. Early planning to mitigate water shortages during the initial stage of future crop growth is crucial for ensuring food security and managing water-related challenges in the NRB and neighboring mid-high latitude regions.

Keywords

Climate and LULC changes / ESSI-3 / Hydrological modeling / Snowmelt / Naoli River Basin

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Chuanqi Liu: Methodology, Software, Validation, Writing – original draft. Chi Xu: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Writing – original draft. Zhijie Zhang: Conceptualization, Validation, Writing – review & editing. Shengqing Xiong: Methodology, Data curation, Writing – review & editing. Wanchang Zhang: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – review & editing, Supervision. Bo Zhang: Validation. Hao Chen: Validation. Yongxin Xu: Data curation. Shuhang Wang: Validation.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the National Tibetan Plateau Data Center (http://data.tpdc.ac.cn), and the Inter–Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (https://data.isimip.org/) for providing datasets. We thank LetPub (www.letpub.com) for linguistic assistance and pre–submission expert review. This research was jointly funded by the Innovative Research Program of the International Research Center of Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals (Grant No. CBAS2022IRP08) and the Major science and technology project of Ministry of Water Resources (Grant No. SKS-2022008).

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