Impacts of Global Warming Perturbation on Water Resources in Arid Zone

Climate change has become the most urgent problem confronted by the Earth today, with possible substantial impacts on natural systems as well as serious environmental implications for human beings. Global warming variations and changes may interpolate hydrologic conditions and result in a variety of possible impacts on water resource sector. Water resources are limited in most arid and semi-arid regions of the world, and are under high pressure due to increasing populations. Groundwater flow is also affected by global warming perturbations through refill processes.

The Kaidu River Basin is located in Northwest China. In this basin, both climatic factors such as temperature, wind and precipitation during the period from the 1980s to the present have been increasing. During the same period, the climate has changed considerably from dry to humid and these changes have considerably affected the hydrology of the Kaidu River Basin. But the predecessors all confined their investigations in this basin to the period before 2002.

In order to assess the long-term impacts of global warming perturbation on water resources of the Kaidu River Basin, 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.

This work has been published on Journal of Mountain Science, 2011, 8(5): 704-710. The paper is also archived at http://www.springerlink.com/content/a87376hq86495r60/.

Evolution of precipitation in Kaidu River Basin from 1979-2007