Title
Land-use change may exacerbate climate change impacts on water resources in the Ganges basin
Date Issued
27 February 2018
Access level
open access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Tsarouchi G.
Imperial College London
Publisher(s)
Copernicus GmbH
Abstract
Quantifying how land-use change and climate change affect water resources is a challenge in hydrological science. This work aims to quantify how future projections of land-use and climate change might affect the hydrological response of the Upper Ganges river basin in northern India, which experiences monsoon flooding almost every year. Three different sets of modelling experiments were run using the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES) land surface model (LSM) and covering the period 2000-2035: in the first set, only climate change is taken into account, and JULES was driven by the CMIP5 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5) outputs of 21 models, under two representative concentration pathways (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5), whilst land use was held fixed at the year 2010. In the second set, only land-use change is taken into account, and JULES was driven by a time series of 15 future land-use pathways, based on Landsat satellite imagery and the Markov chain simulation, whilst the meteorological boundary conditions were held fixed at years 2000-2005. In the third set, both climate change and land-use change were taken into consideration, as the CMIP5 model outputs were used in conjunction with the 15 future land-use pathways to force JULES. Variations in hydrological variables (stream flow, evapotranspiration and soil moisture) are calculated during the simulation period. Significant changes in the near-future (years 2030-2035) hydrologic fluxes arise under future land-cover and climate change scenarios pointing towards a severe increase in high extremes of flow: the multi-model mean of the 95th percentile of streamflow (Q5) is projected to increase by 63% under the combined land-use and climate change high emissions scenario (RCP8.5). The changes in all examined hydrological components are greater in the combined land-use and climate change experiment. Results are further presented in a water resources context, aiming to address potential implications of climate change and land-use change from a water demand perspective. We conclude that future water demands in the Upper Ganges region for winter months may not be met.
Start page
1411
End page
1435
Volume
22
Issue
2
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Oceanografía, Hidrología, Recursos hídricos
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85042705728
Source
Hydrology and Earth System Sciences
ISSN of the container
10275606
Sponsor(s)
Acknowledgements. Gina Tsarouchi acknowledges support by the Grantham Institute for Climate Change (Imperial College London) and HR Wallingford. Wouter Buytaert acknowledges support by the NERC Changing Water Cycle (South Asia) project hydrometeorological feedbacks and changes in water storage and fluxes in northern India (grant number NE/I022558/1). We also acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modelling groups (listed in Table A1 of this paper) for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP the US Department of Energy’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provided coordinating support and led the development of the software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals. We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which helped us improve the manuscript.
Natural Environment Research Council - NE/I022558/1 - NERC
National Eye Research Centre - NERC
Sources of information:
Directorio de Producción Científica
Scopus