Impacts of global warming perturbation on water resources in arid zone: Case study of Kaidu River Basin in Northwest China

The main goal of this study was to assess the long-term impacts of global warming perturbation on water resources of the Kaidu River Basin in Northwest China. Temperature, precipitation and hydrology data during the past 29 years from 1979 to 2007 were collected and analyzed using parametric and non-parametric methods, the connection between temperature and precipitation by the combination of grey correlation analysis method and the hypothesis testing for trend of climate change. The results show a high increase in temperature in the study area as well as an extreme and highly variable hydrological regime in this region, where flash floods can exceed the total runoff from a sequence of years. These variations may be due to the geographical location of the Kaidu River Basin in arid zone. It also reveals that precipitation has a much greater impact on stream flow than that of temperature. The development of new approaches was proposed as responses to climate change in this arid region.