Long-term Projection of Surface Runoff in the Fu River Basin Based on Water-energy Balance

The projection of surface runoff in the context of climate change is important to the rational utilization and distribution of water resources. This study conducted a case study in Fu River basin. A basin scale hydrological model was built based on macroscale processes of surface runoff and water-energy balance. This model can describe the quantitative relationship among climatic factors, underlying surface and surface runoff. Driven by hypothetical climatic scenarios and climate change dataset provided by CMIP5, the climate change impacts on surface runoff in the Fu River basin can be addressed. The results showed that: 1) Compared with other distributed hydrological models, the hydrological model in this study uses fewer parameters and has simpler calculation methods, which was good at simulating annual surface runoff. 2) The surface runoff was less sensitivity to climate change in the Fu River basin, i.e., the increase of only 1 °C in temperature might result in a surface runoff decrease of 3.6% to 6.3% and a 1% precipitation increase might result in a streamflow increase of 1.7% to 1.9%. 3) The temperature across the Fu River Basin was projected to increase by 1.1 to 2.6℃ from 2020 to 2050, as compared to that from 1961 to 1990. But the uncertainty existed among the projection results of precipitation. The surface runoff was expected to decrease by 10% to 11% without considering the climate change projected by GFDL-ESM2M, which was much different from those predicted by other GCMs. © 2019, Editorial Department of Advanced Engineering Sciences. All right reserved.