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Impact of changes in land use and climate on the runoff in Liuxihe Watershed based on SWAT model.

YUAN Yu-zhi, ZHANG Zheng-dong, MENG Jin-hua   

  1. (School of Geography, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China)
  • Online:2015-04-18 Published:2015-04-18

Abstract: SWAT model, an extensively used distributed hydrological model, was used to quantitatively analyze the influences of changes in land use and climate on the runoff at watershed scale. Liuxihe Watershed’s SWAT model was established and three scenarios were set. The calibration and validation at three hydrological stations of Wenquan, Taipingchang and Nangang showed that the three factors of Wenquan station just only reached the standard in validated period, and the other two stations had relative error (RE)<15%, correlation coefficient (R2)>0.8 and NashSutcliffe efficiency valve (Ens)>0.75, suggesting that SWAT model was appropriate for simulating runoff response to land use change and climate variability in Liuxihe watershed. According to the integrated scenario simulation, the annual runoff increased by 11.23 m3·s-1 from 2001 to 2010 compared with the baseline period from 1991 to 2000, among which, the land use change caused an annual runoff reduction of 0.62 m3·s-1, whereas climate variability caused an annual runoff increase of 11.85 m3·s-1. Apparently, the impact of climate variability was stronger than that of land use change. On the other hand, the scenario simulation of extreme land use showed that compared with the land use in 2000, the annual runoff of the farmland scenario and the grassland scenario increased by 2.7% and 0.5% respectively, while that of the forest land scenario were reduced by 0.7%, which suggested that forest land had an ability of diversion closure. Furthermore, the scenario simulation of climatic variability indicated that the change of river runoff correlated positively with precipitation change (increase of 11.6% in annual runoff with increase of 10% in annual precipitation), but negatively with air temperature change (reduction of 0.8% in annual runoff with increase of 1 ℃ in annual mean air temperature), which showed that the impact of precipitation variability was stronger than that of air temperature change. Therefore, in face of climate variability, we need to pay attention to strong rainfall forecasts, optimization of land use structure and spatial distribution, which could reduce the negative hydrological effects (such as floods) induced by climate change.