Estimating the Effects of Climatic Variability and Human Activities on Streamflow in the Hutuo River Basin, China
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Volume 18, Issue 4
Abstract
Climatic variability and human activities are the two primary factors that affect basin hydrology, and thus quantification of their effects is of great importance for water resources management and sustainable development at a catchment scale. In this study, the writers investigated the long-term trends and abrupt changes in hydroclimatic variables, including precipitation, potential evapotranspiration (PET), and runoff, from 1957–2000 in the Hutuo River Basin by the nonparametric Mann-Kendall test and the precipitation-runoff double cumulative curve method. A two-parameter hydrological model and linear regression method were employed to separate and quantify the effects of climatic variability and human activities on runoff. The results are the following: (1) significant downward trends for annual precipitation and annual runoff were detected by the Mann-Kendall test at a 99% confidence level, (2) a change in the gradient of precipitation-runoff double cumulative curves and an abrupt change in runoff series can both be found in 1979, indicating that the relationship between precipitation and runoff has changed; as a result, the annual runoff from 1957–2000 can be divided into two periods termed the baseline (1957–1979) and human-induced (1980–2000) periods, and (3) the climate variability was the primary cause for the decrease in annual runoff from the baseline to the human-induced period, despite certain effects of human activities on the change with respect to annual runoff.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Major State Basic Research Development Program of China (Program 973, 2006CB403400), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51009046, 50839002), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu province (BK2010519), and the Open Research Fund Program of the State Key Laboratory of Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering Science (2009B053). The writers thank the National Climatic Centre (NCC) of the China Meteorological Administration for providing valuable meteorological data. Cordial thanks are extended to the Editor Professor Jessica Freeman and two anonymous referees for their valuable comments, which greatly improved the quality of the paper.
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Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 18 • Issue 4 • April 2013
Pages: 422 - 430
Copyright
© 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Apr 30, 2011
Accepted: May 24, 2012
Published online: May 28, 2012
Published in print: Apr 1, 2013
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