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Climate change impacts on Yangtze River discharge at the Three Gorges Dam

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posted on 2019-01-14, 11:08 authored by Steve J. Birkinshaw, Selma B. Guerreiro, Alex Nicholson, Qiuhua LiangQiuhua Liang, Paul Quinn, Lili Zhang, Bin He, Junxian Yin, Hayley J. Fowler
The Yangtze River basin is home to more than 400 million people and contributes to nearly half of China's food production. Therefore, planning for climate change impacts on water resource discharges is essential. We used a physically based distributed hydrological model, Shetran, to simulate discharge in the Yangtze River just below the Three Gorges Dam at Yichang (1007200km2), obtaining an excellent match between simulated and measured daily discharge, with Nash–Sutcliffe efficiencies of 0.95 for the calibration period (1996–2000) and 0.92 for the validation period (2001–2005). We then used a simple monthly delta change approach for 78 climate model projections (35 different general circulation models – GCMs) from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) to examine the effect of climate change on river discharge for 2041–2070 for Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5. Projected changes to the basin's annual precipitation varied between −3.6 and +14.8% but increases in temperature and consequently evapotranspiration (calculated using the Thornthwaite equation) were projected by all CMIP5 models, resulting in projected changes in the basin's annual discharge from −29.8 to +16.0%. These large differences were mainly due to the predicted expansion of the summer monsoon north and west into the Yangtze Basin in some CMIP5 models, e.g. CanESM2, but not in others, e.g. CSIRO-Mk3-6-0. This was despite both models being able to simulate current climate well. Until projections of the strength and location of the monsoon under a future climate improve, large uncertainties in the direction and magnitude of future change in discharge for the Yangtze will remain.

Funding

This work was a result of the following funding projects: (1) 973 Program (grant no. 2013CB036401) and (2) UK EPSRC Global Secure project (EP/K004689/1). Hayley J. Fowler was supported by the Wolfson Foundation and the Royal Society as a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holder (WM140025).

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Published in

Hydrology and Earth System Sciences

Volume

21

Issue

4

Pages

1911 - 1927

Citation

BIRKINSHAW, S.J. ... et al, 2017. Climate change impacts on Yangtze River discharge at the Three Gorges Dam. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 21 (4), pp.1911-1927.

Publisher

Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union © The authors

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Acceptance date

2017-03-08

Publication date

2017-04-05

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Copernicus Publications under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

ISSN

1027-5606

eISSN

1607-7938

Language

  • en

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