Response of Streamflow to Weather Variability under Climate Change in the Colorado Rockies
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 12, Issue 1
Abstract
We examine the response of streamflow to long-term rainfall variability under climate change by coupling downscaled global climate model precipitation to a distributed hydrologic model. We use daily output of the coupled global climate model (CGCM2) of the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis corresponding to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Emission Scenarios B2 scenario. The B2 scenario envisions slower population growth (10.4 billion by 2100) with a more rapidly evolving economy and more emphasis on environmental protection. We use the Hydrologic Modeling System of the Hydrologic Engineering Center for distributed hydrologic modeling. Because of the incongruence between the spatial scale of the CGCM2 output and that of the hydrologic model, a new space-time stochastic random cascade model was implemented in order to downscale the CGCM2 precipitation. The downscaling model accounts for the observed spatial intermittency of precipitation as well as for the self-similar scaling structure of its spatial distribution. For the South Platte basin, results show that the distribution of peak flow rate is more sensitive to the spatial variability of rainfall than total runoff volume. Results also show that the relative impact of long-term rainfall variation associated with climate change on total runoff and peak flow can be much greater than the magnitude of the rainfall variation itself, and that the magnitude of the impact depends strongly on the magnitude of the associated change in evapotranspiration.
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Acknowledgments
This research was partially supported by the National Institute for Global Environmental Change through the U.S. Department of Energy (Cooperative Agreement No. DE-FC03-90ER61010). The data were provided by the Global Hydrology Resource Center (GHRC) at the Global Hydrology and Climate Center, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Huntsville, Ala.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 12 • Issue 1 • January 2007
Pages: 63 - 72
Copyright
© 2007 ASCE.
History
Received: Oct 4, 2004
Accepted: Mar 22, 2006
Published online: Jan 1, 2007
Published in print: Jan 2007
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