A regional assessment of wet/dry spells characteristics using RCPs scenarios in a semiarid region
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ORIGINAL PAPER
A regional assessment of wet/dry spells characteristics using RCPs scenarios in a semiarid region Mahsa Mirdashtvan 1 & Arash Malekian 2 Received: 20 December 2019 / Accepted: 29 July 2020 # Saudi Society for Geosciences 2020
Abstract Predicting and analyzing wet/dry spells characteristics are vital for an appropriate understanding of climate change and its impacts on water resources management, particularly in arid and semiarid regions. Based on the downscaled precipitation series retrieved from the large-scale outputs of CanESM2 climate model under RCPs scenarios, wet/dry spells characteristics were analyzed during 2011–2040, in one of the most vulnerable arid and semiarid basins located in the Southern Alborz region, Iran. The results suggest that the mean wet spells number decreases during the 2020s period under RCP 2.6, 4.5, and 8.5 scenarios, while mean dry spells number indicates increasing values for the near future compared with the baseline. Moreover, short-length wet spells are dominant, while dry spells with medium durations are prevailing in the study region. On the other hand, dry spells persistence is much higher than those of wet spells, although there is no significant difference among the average wet spells number. Furthermore, there is not any significant difference among the persistence of wet spells under various RCPs scenarios. These results illustrate that the risk of flood events will be alleviated in the region ,whereas the risk of longer droughts events will increase. The main findings of this study show that analyzing the characteristics of wet/dry spells can lead to more accurate and efficient strategies to have sustainable resources management under the changing climate. Keywords Climate change . Dry spells . Wet spells . RCPs scenarios . Drought . Iran
Introduction Various international studies and reports (Field et al. 2014; Houghton et al. 2001; Solomon et al. 2007; Stocker 2014) have represented that climate change has serious impacts on the principles of the hydrological cycle such as precipitation and air temperature. Among the various elements of the hydrological cycle, precipitation is one of the significant variables in assessing climate change. Precipitation, as a discrete variable, has a complicated spatiotemporal structure (Almazroui et al. 2017). Wet/dry spells specify the variability of daily precipitation and are suitable indicators in order to demonstrate the weather pattern of a region (Huang et al. 2017). Dry spells can bring inadequate amounts of Responsible Editor: Zhihua Zhang * Arash Malekian [email protected] 1
Gorgan University of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources, Gorgan, Iran
2
University of Tehran, Karaj, Iran
precipitation which may result in drought events; on the other hand, if wet spells cause too much precipitation, therefore, extreme flood events will happen (Anandhi et al. 2016; Vinnarasi and Dhanya 2016). Wet/dry spells analyses and studying their relationships with precipitation amounts will provide valuable informati
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