Stochastic generation of daily streamflow data incorporating land use and/or climate change effects

Abstract

In the stochastic hydrology literature, suitable time series modelling approaches have been developed for modelling daily streamflow. However, problems arise with this approach if changes are occurring to the precipitation regime generating the historic streamflow data, or if land-use changes are occurring within the catchment which may alter the water balance and the streamflow regime. Traditional time series modelling approaches employ historic streamflow data only and will generate synthetic data which are representative only of the historic conditions. It is not possible to predict how the model parameters should be changed to reflect changes in the climate (precipitation) and catchment response regimes. Developing a methodology to deal with the stochastic generation of daily streamflow that reflects changes to the catchment system and climatic inputs (rainfall and potential evapotranspiration) and then applying the corresponding methodology to a study catchment (upper Thames) in England is the focus of this study. To study the water resources impacts of land-use change on the daily streamflow regime of a catchment, a daily rainfall-runoff model is needed which can accommodate various land cover characteristics and provide separate estimates of potential and actual evapotranspiration in its evapotranspiration component for each land cover type. Given a model with this capability, the impacts of various land-use scenarios on daily streamflow can be investigated. In the case of climate change, since GCMs do not provide useable results on a short time scale such as a day and on a spatial scale such as a catchment of about 1000 km2, a methodology is required to predict the changes which may occur in the climate inputs of a catchment, and the resulting impacts on water resources. The approach developed here for water resources impact studies of land-use change and climate change has three main elements: (I) Two stochastic models, one for rainfall (Neyman-Scott Rectangular Pulses, NSRP, model) and the other for potential evapotranspiration (PET), are employed to generate daily rainfall and daily PET sequencesr,e spectively. Thesem odels have been validated using historic records for the study catchment. ABSTRACT ii (II) The ARNO model has been calibrated and validated using daily streamflow data for the study catchment. The evapotranspiration component of the model has been modified to obtain a satisfactory water balance. The model is then extended to include the explicit calculation of interception for different land cover types within the catchment. The runoff from these areas is then routed to the catchment outlet. The rainfall and PET models are used to generate synthetic daily input series to the modified ARNO model for present catchment land-use conditions, and overall procedure is validated using the historic streamflow record. This is then worked out using the extended model and referred to as the constructed` control' scenariow hich is used as a benchmarkf or assessingla nd-usec hange impacts on water resources for two different land-use scenarios. (III) The transient GCM climate scenarios are used as the starting point for assessing climate change impacts. Regression relationships are derived between atmospheric circulation variables and rainfall statistics used in fitting the NSRP model for present climate conditions and then used to predict the rainfall statistics for future conditions using GCM outputs. That is, the scenarios of a climate model are downscaled by a regression technique to a resolution sufficient to represent daily rainfall at the catchment scale. To generate potential evapotranspiration (PET) scenarios, an empirical equation is used to estimate PET daily values as a function of temperature, thus enabling future scenarios to be generated as a function of GCM temperature predictions. Generated rainfall and PET scenarios are used as inputs to the adapted ARNO catchment response model to generate daily streamflow data. Impact assessments using both land-use change and climate change scenarios are then carried out using a range of water resources assessment measures such as flow duration curves, cumulative run sums and storage/yield relationships, and the practical implications discussed.