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Arid Land Geography ›› 2021, Vol. 44 ›› Issue (3): 807-818.doi: 10.12118/j.issn.1000–6060.2021.03.23

• Climatology and Hydrology • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Predicting climate change and its impact on runoff in snow-ice basin with multi-climate models

RAN Sihong1,2(),WANG Xiaolei2,3,LUO Yi2,3()   

  1. 1. State Key Laboratory of Desert and Oasis Ecology, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Urumqi 830011, Xinjiang, China
    2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
    3. Key Laboratory of Ecosystem Network Observation and Modeling, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
  • Received:2020-10-10 Revised:2021-04-20 Online:2021-05-25 Published:2021-06-01
  • Contact: Yi LUO E-mail:18810990976@163.com;luoyi@igsnrr.ac.cn

Abstract:

The snow-ice melt water in glacier-covered basins plays an essential role in regulating runoff. The impact of climate change on the snow-ice melting process and quantity change, river runoff process and quantity change, which is related to the glacier area in the basin. Using climate models’ meteorological data of CMIP5 driven watershed hydrological model, simulated runoff response to climate change in Tianshan areas (Kumaric River, Manas River, and Kuqa River, Xinjiang, China). The results show that with the temperature and precipitation increasing in the future, three river basins’ snow melt water is both increasing, but ice melt water changes affected by glacier coverage. The change of runoff was mainly affected by the increase in precipitation and the change in snow and ice melt water; the runoff increased by 5.8%-14.3% (Kuqa River), 2.9%-11.4% (Manas River), and 12.9%-47.1% (Kumaric River) under three representative concentration pathways (RCPs). It was estimated that the variation range of runoff uncertainty was affected by ice melting. From the projected intra-annual distribution of runoff, the snow and ice melt of the three basins, the spring runoff of the river basins increased compared with the historical period due to the snow melt time ahead and snow melt volume. In the summer, the peak runoff of the Kuqa River and Manas River decreased due to ice melt water, whereas the peak value of runoff in Kumaric River increased. In addition, the estimated uncertainty range of summer runoff in the study basins in the summer season is significantly larger than those of other seasons.

Key words: climate change, climate model, hydrological model, glacier, runoff