Use of Regional Climate Models for Proxy Data over Transboundary Regions
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 21, Issue 6
Abstract
The sharing of water resources across transboundary regions between countries has long been a political problem. Sharing of data among countries is also a significant impediment for both planning and research purposes. In the context of climate change, it is necessary to know about possible future climatic changes and their potential impacts that would be especially crucial to water resources management. This requires data for hydrological modeling and data management, as in the case of river basins. This paper presents a study over the course of the Da River, which flows from China (upstream) to Vietnam (downstream), and it is assumed that rainfall data from China are not available. To overcome data limitation, regional climate model outputs are used as proxy data for this upstream region to study changes over the downstream Da River. The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model was used as the regional climate model, driven by the European reanalysis data for the baseline period of 1961–1987 for a domain covering the transboundary areas, at a resolution of 25 km. Precipitation outputs from this model were used as inputs to the hydrological model and soil and water assessment tools (SWAT) to calibrate/validate the model at data-available gauging station sites. The initial results of this study imply that the regional climate model (RCM) data proxies serve as a good alternative to assess water resources over transboundary regions and are useful tools for assessing future climate changes and their impacts at subregional and local scales.
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Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 21 • Issue 6 • June 2016
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© 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Dec 19, 2014
Accepted: Nov 7, 2015
Published online: Feb 26, 2016
Published in print: Jun 1, 2016
Discussion open until: Jul 26, 2016
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