Impacts of climate change on the glacier melt runoff from five river basins

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andre G. Savitskiy ◽  
Maja Schlüter ◽  
Raisa V. Taryannikova ◽  
Natalya A. Agaltseva ◽  
Viktor E. Chub

2021 ◽  
Vol 169 (3-4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Babatunde J. Abiodun ◽  
Romaric C. Odoulami ◽  
Windmanagda Sawadogo ◽  
Olumuyiwa A. Oloniyo ◽  
Abayomi A. Abatan ◽  
...  

AbstractMost socio-economic activities in Africa depend on the continent’s river basins, but effectively managing drought risks over the basins in response to climate change remains a big challenge. While studies have shown that the stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) intervention could mitigate temperature-related climate change impacts over Africa, there is a dearth of information on how the SAI intervention could influence drought characteristics and drought risk managements over the river basins. The present study thus examines the potential impacts of climate change and the SAI intervention on droughts and drought management over the major river basins in Africa. Multi-ensemble climate simulation datasets from the Stratospheric Aerosol Geoengineering Large Ensemble (GLENS) Project were analysed for the study. The Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) and the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) were used to characterize the upper and lower limits of future drought severity, respectively, over the basins. The SPEI is a function of rainfall and potential evapotranspiration, whereas the SPI is only a function of rainfall, so the difference between the two indices is influenced by atmospheric evaporative demand. The results of the study show that, while the SAI intervention, as simulated in GLENS, may offset the impacts of climate change on temperature and atmospheric evaporative demand, the level of SAI that compensates for temperature change would overcompensate for the impacts on precipitation and therefore impose a climate water balance deficit in the tropics. SAI would narrow the gaps between SPEI and SPI projections over the basins by reducing SPEI drought frequency through reduced temperature and atmospheric evaporative demand while increasing SPI drought frequency through reduced rainfall. The narrowing of this gap lowers the level of uncertainty regarding future changes in drought frequency, but nonetheless has implications for future drought management in the basins, because while SAI lowers the upper limit of the future drought stress, it also raises the lower limit of the drought stress.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (8) ◽  
pp. 1197-1206
Author(s):  
Sohaib Baig ◽  
Takahiro Sayama ◽  
Kaoru Takara ◽  
◽  
◽  
...  

The upper Indus River basin has large masses of glaciers that supply meltwater in the summer. Water resources from the upper Indus River basin are crucial for human activities and ecosystems in Pakistan, but they are vulnerable to climate change. This study focuses on the impacts of climate change, particularly the effects of receding glaciers on the water resources in a catchment of the upper Indus river basin. This study predicts river flow using a hydrologic model coupled with temperature-index snow and glacier melt models forced by observed climate data. The basin is divided into seven elevation zones so that the melt components and rainfall-runoff were calculated at each elevation zone. Hydrologic modeling revealed that glaciers contributed one-third of the total flow while snowmelt melt contributed about 40%; rainfall contributed to the remaining flow. Some climate scenarios based on CMIP5 and CORDEX were employed to quantify the impacts of climate change on annual river flows. The glacier retreat in the mid and late centuries is also considered based on climate change scenarios. Future river flows, simulated by the hydrologic model, project significant changes in their quantity and timing. In the mid-century, river flows will increase because of higher precipitation and glacier melt. Simulations projected that until 2050, the overall river flows will increase by 11%, and no change in the shape of the hydrograph is expected. However, this increasing trend in river flows will reverse in the late century because glaciers will not have enough mass to sustain the glacier melt flow. The change will result in a 4.5% decrease in flow, and the timing of the monthly peak flow will shift from June to May. This earlier shift in the streamflow will make water management more difficult in the future, requiring inclusive approaches in water resource management.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peirong Lin ◽  
Eric Wood ◽  
Ming Pan ◽  
Yuan Yang ◽  
Hylke Beck ◽  
...  

<p>Impacts of climate change on floods have been recently suggested to be more consistently seen in flood timing (or flood seasonality) as opposed to flood magnitude and frequency. Changes in flood timing can threaten the finely tuned water resource management systems and, if poorly understood, can alter flood risks in unpredictable ways. Nevertheless, patterns of global flood timing trend remain elusive. Whether climate change has played a significant role in shifting flood timing worldwide also remains unknown.</p><p>Here we obtained an unprecedented set of discharge records from tens of thousands of global gauges and model-reconstructed naturalized discharge at ~3 million river reaches to delineate flood timing trend across the global river networks from 1980 to 2019. Hydroclimate drivers possibly causing these trends, including maximum precipitation, antecedent soil moisture, and snowmelt timing, are also investigated to disentangle climate change signals on floods. We found that the flood timing has been significantly earlier over the lower Mississippi, the Amur and the Amazon river basins, as well as large parts of the high-latitude Northern Hemisphere. Significant later floods are observed over the Yangtze and the lower Congo river basins, and the southeast Asia. However, ascribing these flood timing shifts to changing climate is not as obvious as previously suggested, implying the need for further research on this topic.</p>


2004 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 113-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
K Jasper ◽  
P Calanca ◽  
D Gyalistras ◽  
J Fuhrer

2011 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
W.-A. Flügel

Abstract. Adaptive Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) options related to the impacts of climate change in the twinning basins of the Upper Danube River Basin (UDRB) and the Upper Brahmaputra River Basin (UBRB) are developed based on the results obtained in the different work packages of the BRAHMATWINN project. They have been described and discussed in Chapter 2 till Chapter 9 and the paper is referring to and is integrating these findings with respect to their application and interpretation for the development of adaptive IWRM options addressing impacts of climate change in river basins. The data and information related to the results discussed in Chapter 2 till 8 have been input to the RBIS as a central component of the IWRMS (Chapter 9). Meanwhile the UDRB has been analysed with respect to IWRM and climate change impacts by various projects, i.e. the GLOWA-Danube BMBF funded project (GLOWA Danube, 2009; Mauser and Ludwig, 2002) the UBRB has not been studied so far in a similar way as it was done in the BRAHMATWINN project. Therefore the IWRM option development is focussing on the UBRB but the methodology presented can be applied for the UDRB and other river basins as well. Data presented and analysed in this chapter have been elaborated by the BRAHMATWINN project partners and are published in the project deliverable reports available from the project homepage http://www.brahmatwinn.uni-jena.de/index.php?id=5311&L=2.


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