Future climate and its impact on streamflow: a case study of the Brahmaputra river basin
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Future climate and its impact on streamflow: a case study of the Brahmaputra river basin Pulendra Dutta1 · Gilbert Hinge1 · Jeffrey Denzil K. Marak1 · Arup Kumar Sarma1 Received: 5 September 2020 / Accepted: 17 October 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Using various GCM (general circulation model), the present study attempted to analyze the impact of climate change on the entire stretch of one of the major rivers in South Asia, the Brahmaputra river basin. Initially, we identified a suitable GCM based on some statistical measures of the interpolated and bias-corrected variables. The results of the trend analysis show a significant impact on the climatic variables during future periods. The Brahmaputra basin is likely to experience an increase in rainfall, maximum temperature, and minimum temperature at the rates of 2.5 mm/year, 0.062 °C/year and 0.05 °C/year, respectively, corresponding to representative concentration pathway (RCP) 8.5 scenarios till the end of the current century. Moreover, the climate change impact analysis on streamflow indicates a rise of up to 13.06% in annual discharge at Pandughat, India. The findings of this study will provide a basis for water resource management of the transboundary Brahmaputra basin in the coming decades. Keywords Brahmaputra · Climate change · Streamflow
Introduction In recent years, increased concentration of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, has been reported, which induce climate change around the world (Arrow 2007; Hinge et al. 2018, 2020). This change leads to an increase in the average global temperature, which in turn affects the global hydrological cycle (Pervez and Henebry 2015). Changes in the hydrological cycle are affecting the intensity and duration of precipitation (Trenberth 2011), magnitude of streamflow (Ma et al. 2008), and thereby affect drought and flood (Huntington 2006) characteristics. Thus, the changing climate will have a significant implication on water resource management. There have been many studies in recent years that assessed the likely impacts of climate change on basin Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s40808-020-01022-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Gilbert Hinge [email protected] 1
Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Guwahati, Assam 781039, India
hydrology and water availability (Kim et al. 2008; Pervez and Henebry 2015; Singh and Kumar 2018). All these climate change studies depend on projections of future climate provided by general circulation models (GCM). However, GCM outputs may produce error/biases due to their limited spatial resolution and various thermodynamic as well as climate system processes. Even in cases of regional climate models (RCM), where the climate is simulated by considering the regional characteristics of the area under investigation, there are observed biases between the simulation and the in-situ measuremen
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