Modelling Climate Change’s Impact on the Hydrology of Natura 2000 Wetland Habitats in the Vistula and Odra River Basins in Poland

Climate change is expected to affect the water cycle through changes in precipitation, river streamflow, and soil moisture dynamics, and therefore, present a threat to groundwater and surface water-fed wetland habitats and their biodiversity. This article examines the past trends and future impacts of climate change on riparian, water-dependent habitats within the special areas of conservation (SAC) of the Natura 2000 network located within Odra and Vistula River basins in Poland. Hydrological modelling using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was driven by a set of nine EURO-CORDEX regional climate models under two greenhouse gas concentration trajectories. Changes in the duration of flooding and inundation events were used to assess climate change’s impact on surface water-fed wetland habitats. The groundwater-fed wetlands were evaluated on the basis of changes in soil water content. Information about the current conservation status, threats, and pressures that affect the habitats suggest that the wetlands might dry out. Increased precipitation projected for the future causing increased water supply to both surface water and groundwater-fed wetlands would lead to beneficial outcomes for habitats with good, average, or reduced conservation status. However, habitats with an excellent conservation status that are already in optimum condition could be negatively affected by climate change as increased soil water or duration of overbank flow would exceed their tolerance.

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Assessment of vulnerability of river basins in Ghana to water stress conditions under climate change

Journal of Water and Climate Change ◽

10.2166/wcc.2012.030 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 3 (4) ◽

pp. 276-286 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Emmanuel Obuobie ◽

Kwabena Kankam-Yeboah ◽

Barnabas Amisigo ◽

Yaw Opoku-Ankomah ◽

Deborah Ofori

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Water Stress ◽

Water Resources ◽

Water Scarcity ◽

Climate Models ◽

Assessment Tool ◽

River Basins ◽

Global Climate Models ◽

Control Measures ◽

Basin Surface

The Falkenmark indicator was used to assess vulnerability of the White Volta (106,000 km2) and Pra (20,023 km2) river basins in Ghana to water stress under climate change for the periods 2006–2035 (representing the 2020s) and 2036–2065 (2050s). The indicator is a commonly used measure of water stress and defines thresholds of 1,700, 1,000 and 500 m3/capita/annum as water stress, water scarcity and absolute scarcity, respectively. Downscaled data from ensemble averages of two global climate models, ECHAM4 and CSIRO, were used to drive the Soil and Water Assessment Tool for estimation of basin surface water resources under climate change. The simulated water resources in the two basins showed significant reduction of 22% for 2020. Further reductions were estimated for 2050 (50% and 46% for the White Volta and Pra, respectively). Without climate change, the White Volta basin will attain water stress and water scarcity by 2020 and 2050, respectively; the Pra is already water stressed and expected to worsen to water scarcity by 2020 and absolute scarcity by 2050. Climate change will aggravate the conditions in both basins. Implementation of integrated water resources management and population control measures are recommended for sustainable use and management of water resources in both basins.

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Impacts of climate change on groundwater flooding and ecohydrology in lowland karst

10.5194/hess-2020-203 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Patrick Morrissey ◽

Paul Nolan ◽

Ted McCormack ◽

Paul Johnston ◽

Owen Naughton ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Surface Water ◽

High Resolution ◽

Climate Models ◽

Aquifer Recharge ◽

Climate Conditions ◽

Karst Catchment ◽

Karst Systems ◽

Wetland Habitats ◽

Impacts Of Climate Change

Abstract. Lowland karst aquifers can generate unique wetland habitats which are caused by groundwater fluctuations that result in extensive groundwater-surface water interactions (i.e. flooding). However, the complex hydrogeological attributes of these systems often present difficulty in predicting how they will respond to changing climatological conditions. Extremely fast aquifer recharge processes and flow through well-connected conduit networks in such karst systems make them very susceptible to surcharge conditions – i.e. groundwater-surface water interaction (flooding) – and therefore vulnerable to changes in the sequence and intensity of precipitation patterns. This study investigates the predicted impacts of climate change on a lowland karst catchment by employing a semi-distributed karst model populated with output from high-resolution regional climate models for Ireland. The lowland karst catchment is located on the west coast of Ireland and is characterised by a well-developed karstified limestone aquifer which discharges to the sea via intertidal and submarine springs. Annual above ground flooding associated with this complex karst system has led to the development of unique wetland habitats in the form of ephemeral lakes known as turloughs, however extreme flooding of these features causes widespread damage and disruption in the catchment. This analysis has shown that mean, 95th and 99th percentile flood levels are expected to increase by significant proportions for all future emission scenarios. The frequency of events currently considered to be extreme is predicted to increase, indicating that more significant groundwater flooding events seem likely to become far more common. The seasonality of annual flooding is also predicted to shift later in the flooding season which could have far reaching consequences in terms of ecology and land use in the catchment. The impacts of increasing mean sea levels were also investigated, however it was found that anticipated rises had very little impact on groundwater flooding due to the marginal impact on ebb tide outflow volumes. Overall, this study highlights the vulnerability of lowland karst systems to future changing climate conditions mainly due to the extremely fast recharge which can occur in such systems. The study presents a novel and highly effective methodology for quantifying the potential impact of climate change in lowland karst systems by coupling karst hydrogeological models with the output from high resolution climate simulations.

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Surface Water Temperature Predictions at a Mid-Latitude Reservoir under Long-Term Climate Change Impacts Using a Deep Neural Network Coupled with a Transfer Learning Approach

Water ◽

10.3390/w13081109 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (8) ◽

pp. 1109

Author(s):

Nobuaki Kimura ◽

Kei Ishida ◽

Daichi Baba

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Surface Water ◽

Water Temperature ◽

Transfer Learning ◽

Air Temperature ◽

Climate Models ◽

Temporal Variations ◽

Training Data ◽

Surface Water Temperature

Long-term climate change may strongly affect the aquatic environment in mid-latitude water resources. In particular, it can be demonstrated that temporal variations in surface water temperature in a reservoir have strong responses to air temperature. We adopted deep neural networks (DNNs) to understand the long-term relationships between air temperature and surface water temperature, because DNNs can easily deal with nonlinear data, including uncertainties, that are obtained in complicated climate and aquatic systems. In general, DNNs cannot appropriately predict unexperienced data (i.e., out-of-range training data), such as future water temperature. To improve this limitation, our idea is to introduce a transfer learning (TL) approach. The observed data were used to train a DNN-based model. Continuous data (i.e., air temperature) ranging over 150 years to pre-training to climate change, which were obtained from climate models and include a downscaling model, were used to predict past and future surface water temperatures in the reservoir. The results showed that the DNN-based model with the TL approach was able to approximately predict based on the difference between past and future air temperatures. The model suggested that the occurrences in the highest water temperature increased, and the occurrences in the lowest water temperature decreased in the future predictions.

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Application of SWAT in Hydrological Simulation of Complex Mountainous River Basin (Part II: Climate Change Impact Assessment)

Water ◽

10.3390/w13111548 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (11) ◽

pp. 1548

Author(s):

Suresh Marahatta ◽

Deepak Aryal ◽

Laxmi Prasad Devkota ◽

Utsav Bhattarai ◽

Dibesh Shrestha

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

River Basin ◽

Climate Models ◽

Assessment Tool ◽

Swat Model ◽

Global Climate Models ◽

Climate Data ◽

The Future ◽

The Impact ◽

Mountainous River

This study aims at analysing the impact of climate change (CC) on the river hydrology of a complex mountainous river basin—the Budhigandaki River Basin (BRB)—using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) hydrological model that was calibrated and validated in Part I of this research. A relatively new approach of selecting global climate models (GCMs) for each of the two selected RCPs, 4.5 (stabilization scenario) and 8.5 (high emission scenario), representing four extreme cases (warm-wet, cold-wet, warm-dry, and cold-dry conditions), was applied. Future climate data was bias corrected using a quantile mapping method. The bias-corrected GCM data were forced into the SWAT model one at a time to simulate the future flows of BRB for three 30-year time windows: Immediate Future (2021–2050), Mid Future (2046–2075), and Far Future (2070–2099). The projected flows were compared with the corresponding monthly, seasonal, annual, and fractional differences of extreme flows of the simulated baseline period (1983–2012). The results showed that future long-term average annual flows are expected to increase in all climatic conditions for both RCPs compared to the baseline. The range of predicted changes in future monthly, seasonal, and annual flows shows high uncertainty. The comparative frequency analysis of the annual one-day-maximum and -minimum flows shows increased high flows and decreased low flows in the future. These results imply the necessity for design modifications in hydraulic structures as well as the preference of storage over run-of-river water resources development projects in the study basin from the perspective of climate resilience.

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Groundwater-Surface Water Exchange in Agro-Urban River Basins as Impacted by Climate Change

10.1002/essoar.10510026.1 ◽

2022 ◽

Author(s):

Fatemeh Aliyari ◽

Ryan T Bailey

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Surface Water ◽

Water Exchange ◽

River Basins ◽

Urban River

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Multimodel assessment of climate change-induced hydrologic impacts for a Mediterranean catchment

Hydrology and Earth System Sciences ◽

10.5194/hess-22-4125-2018 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 22 (7) ◽

pp. 4125-4143 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

Enrica Perra ◽

Monica Piras ◽

Roberto Deidda ◽

Claudio Paniconi ◽

Giuseppe Mascaro ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Water Content ◽

Soil Water ◽

Soil Water Content ◽

Climate Models ◽

Actual Evapotranspiration ◽

Soil Conditions ◽

Hydrologic Models ◽

The Future ◽

The Mediterranean

Abstract. This work addresses the impact of climate change on the hydrology of a catchment in the Mediterranean, a region that is highly susceptible to variations in rainfall and other components of the water budget. The assessment is based on a comparison of responses obtained from five hydrologic models implemented for the Rio Mannu catchment in southern Sardinia (Italy). The examined models – CATchment HYdrology (CATHY), Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), TOPographic Kinematic APproximation and Integration (TOPKAPI), TIN-based Real time Integrated Basin Simulator (tRIBS), and WAter balance SImulation Model (WASIM) – are all distributed hydrologic models but differ greatly in their representation of terrain features and physical processes and in their numerical complexity. After calibration and validation, the models were forced with bias-corrected, downscaled outputs of four combinations of global and regional climate models in a reference (1971–2000) and future (2041–2070) period under a single emission scenario. Climate forcing variations and the structure of the hydrologic models influence the different components of the catchment response. Three water availability response variables – discharge, soil water content, and actual evapotranspiration – are analyzed. Simulation results from all five hydrologic models show for the future period decreasing mean annual streamflow and soil water content at 1 m depth. Actual evapotranspiration in the future will diminish according to four of the five models due to drier soil conditions. Despite their significant differences, the five hydrologic models responded similarly to the reduced precipitation and increased temperatures predicted by the climate models, and lend strong support to a future scenario of increased water shortages for this region of the Mediterranean basin. The multimodel framework adopted for this study allows estimation of the agreement between the five hydrologic models and between the four climate models. Pairwise comparison of the climate and hydrologic models is shown for the reference and future periods using a recently proposed metric that scales the Pearson correlation coefficient with a factor that accounts for systematic differences between datasets. The results from this analysis reflect the key structural differences between the hydrologic models, such as a representation of both vertical and lateral subsurface flow (CATHY, TOPKAPI, and tRIBS) and a detailed treatment of vegetation processes (SWAT and WASIM).

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Meteorological, soil moisture, surface water, and groundwater data from the St Denis National Wildlife Area, Saskatchewan, Canada

10.5194/essd-2018-125 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Edward K. P. Bam ◽

Rosa Brannen ◽

Sujata Budhathoki ◽

Andrew M. Ireson ◽

Chris Spence ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Soil Moisture ◽

Surface Water ◽

Climate Models ◽

Multiple Scales ◽

Full Range ◽

Research Network ◽

Groundwater Levels ◽

Groundwater Availability ◽

Surface Water And Groundwater

Abstract. Long-term meteorological, soil moisture, surface water, and groundwater data provide information on past climate change, most notably information that can be used to analyze past changes in precipitation and groundwater availability in a region. These data are also valuable to test, calibrate and validate hydrological and climate models. CCRN (Changing Cold Regions Network) is a collaborative research network that brought together a team of over 40 experts from 8 universities and 4 federal government agencies in Canada for 5 years (2013–18) through the Climate Change and Atmospheric Research (CCAR) Initiative of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). The working group aimed to integrate existing and new data with improved predictive and observational tools to understand, diagnose and predict interactions amongst the cryospheric, ecological, hydrological, and climatic components of the changing Earth system at multiple scales, with a geographic focus on the rapidly changing cold interior of Western Canada. The St Denis National Wildlife Area database contains data for the prairie research site, St Denis National Wildlife Research Area, and includes atmosphere, soil, and groundwater. The meteorological measurements are observed every 5 seconds, and half-hourly averages (or totals) are logged. Soil moisture data comprise volumetric water content, soil temperature, electrical conductivity and matric potential for probes installed at depths of 5 cm, 20 cm, 50 cm, 100 cm, 200 cm and 300 cm in all soil profiles. Additional data on snow surveys, pond and groundwater levels, and water isotope isotopes collected on an intermittent basis between 1968 and 2018 are also presented including information on the dates and ground elevations (datum) used to construct hydraulic heads. The metadata table provides location information, information about the full range of measurements carried out on each parameter and GPS locations that are relevant to the interpretation of the records, as well as citations for both publications and archived data. The compiled data are available at https://doi.org/10.20383/101.0115.

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Risk-based climate-change impact assessment for the water industry

Water Science & Technology ◽

10.2166/wst.2009.877 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 59 (3) ◽

pp. 443-451 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

O. M. Thorne ◽

R. A. Fenner

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Impact Assessment ◽

Climate Change Impact ◽

Climate Models ◽

Assessment Tool ◽

Global Climate Models ◽

Future Climate ◽

Water Industry ◽

Climate Change Impact Assessment ◽

Change Impact

In response to a rapidly changing and highly variable climate, engineers are being asked to perform climate-change impact assessments on existing water industry systems. There is currently no single method of best practice for engineers to interpret output from global climate models (GCMs) and calculate probabilistic distributions of future climate changes as required for risk-based impact assessments. The simplified climate change impact assessment tool (SCIAT) has been developed to address the specific needs of the water industry and provides a tool to translate climate change projections into ‘real world’ impacts or for detailed statistical analysis. Through the use of SCIAT, water system operators are provided with knowledge of potential impacts and an associated probability of occurrence, enabling them to make informed, risk-based adaptation and planning decisions. This paper demonstrates the application of SCIAT to the consideration of the impacts of climate change on reservoir water quality under future climate scenarios.

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Modelling climate change impact on water resources of the Upper Indus Basin

Journal of Water and Climate Change ◽

10.2166/wcc.2021.233 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Jamal H. Ougahi ◽

Mark E. J. Cutler ◽

Simon J. Cook

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Water Resources ◽

Climate Models ◽

River Flow ◽

Assessment Tool ◽

Global Climate Models ◽

Indus Basin ◽

Water Yield ◽

River Flows ◽

Upper Indus Basin

Abstract Climate change has implications for water resources by increasing temperature, shifting precipitation patterns and altering the timing of snowfall and glacier melt, leading to shifts in the seasonality of river flows. Here, the Soil & Water Assessment Tool was run using downscaled precipitation and temperature projections from five global climate models (GCMs) and their multi-model mean to estimate the potential impact of climate change on water balance components in sub-basins of the Upper Indus Basin (UIB) under two emission (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) and future (2020–2050 and 2070–2100) scenarios. Warming of above 6 °C relative to baseline (1974–2004) is projected for the UIB by the end of the century (2070–2100), but the spread of annual precipitation projections among GCMs is large (+16 to −28%), and even larger for seasonal precipitation (+91 to −48%). Compared to the baseline, an increase in summer precipitation (RCP8.5: +36.7%) and a decrease in winter precipitation were projected (RCP8.5: −16.9%), with an increase in average annual water yield from the nival–glacial regime and river flow peaking 1 month earlier. We conclude that predicted warming during winter and spring could substantially affect the seasonal river flows, with important implications for water supplies.

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Assessment and Mitigation of Streamflow and Sediment Yield under Climate Change Conditions in Diyala River Basin, Iraq

Hydrology ◽

10.3390/hydrology6030063 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 6 (3) ◽

pp. 63 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Mahmoud S. Al-Khafaji ◽

Rana D. Al-Chalabi

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Sediment Yield ◽

Climate Models ◽

Assessment Tool ◽

Coefficient Of Determination ◽

Base Period ◽

Important Challenge ◽

Diyala River ◽

The Impact ◽

Water Assessment

The impact of climate change on the streamflow and sediment yield in the Derbendkhan and Hemrin Watersheds is an important challenge facing the water resources of the Diyala River in Iraq. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was used to project this impact on streamflow and sediment yield until year 2050 by applying five climate models for scenario A1B involving medium emissions. The models were calibrated and validated based on daily observed streamflow and sediment recorded for the periods from 1984 to 2013 and 1984 to 1985, respectively. The Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency and coefficient of determination values for the calibration (validation) were 0.61 (0.53) and 0.6 (0.62) for Derbendkhan and Hemrin, respectively. In addition, the average of the future predictions for the five climate models indicated that the streamflow (sediment yield) for the Derbendkhan and Hemrin Watersheds would decrease to 49% (43.7%) and 20% (30%), respectively, until 2050, compared with the observed flow of the base period from 1984 to 2013. The spatial analysis showed that 10.4% and 68% of the streamflow comes from Iraqi parts of the Derbendkhan and Hemrin Watersheds, respectively, while 10% and 60% of the sediment comes from the Iraqi parts of the Derbendkhan and Hemrin Watersheds, respectively. Deforestation of the northern part of the Hemrin Watershed is the best method to decrease the amount of sediment entering the Hemrin Reservoir.

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