Yutong Chen

Spatio-temporal Changes and Frequency Analysis of Drought in the Wei River Basin, China

This study has investigated the spatio-temporal changes of droughts from 1961 to 2005 in the Wei River Basin. The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) was employed to describe the droughts. The trends of SPI value at all the meteorological stations were calculated by using the modified Mann-Kendall (MMK) trend test method, indicating that the western basin has a significantly wet trend, whilst the eastern basin including the Guanzhong Plain has a trend towards drought . Since the historical droughts records were too short to fully investigate drought properties in this basin, a practical nonparametric method was proposed to calculate the joint probability distribution of drought properties, which overcomes the shortcomings of the univariate and parametric frequency analysis. The frequency analysis of drought in the Wei River Basin indicates that the Guanzhong Plain and the surrounding areas of Huanxian meteorological station have a high drought risks, whilst the western and northern basin except the surrounding areas of Huanxian station has a relatively low drought risk.

Spatio-Temporal Changes in Potential Evaporation Based on Entropy Across the Wei River Basin

The distribution of potential evaporation is highly unstable due to complex human activities and climate changes. Therefore, it is of great significance for further understanding hydrological cycle to estimate potential evaporation distribution. Reasonable regionalization of potential evaporation will help to improve the efficiency of irrigation and increase the ability of drought relief, which is of great importance to irrigation planning and management. Hence, the spatio-temporal changes in potential evaporation distribution at monthly and annual scales are investigated based on the modified Mann-Kendall trend test method and the entropy theory in the Wei River Basin. A nonparametric method as an attractive alternative to empirical and parametric approaches is proposed to calculate the univariate and bivariate probability distribution of potential evaporation. The directional information transfer index (DITI) is employed to estimate the similarity among the meteorological stations, and the k-means cluster analysis is used to classify the meteorological stations into several distribution zones with distinct features. Based on the monthly potential evaporation from 1960 to 2008 at 21 meteorological stations, the basin is ultimately classified into 8 zones with their own distinct spatio-temporal distribution features. In view of the distinct spatio-temporal distribution features, the DITI-based model combined with the nonparametric probability estimation method and the k-means cluster analysis offers a more precise classification of potential evaporation distribution zones.

Identification of abrupt changes of the relationship between rainfall and runoff in the Wei River Basin, China

The relationship between rainfall and runoff in the Wei River Basin, one of the most important relationships in hydrology, possibly changed due to the changing climate and increasingly intensifying human activities. The identification of abrupt changes of the relationship will help to further understand the changing mechanism of runoff generation, being a great stimulus to the development of water resources planning and management. Therefore, a new method based on copulas was employed to detect change points of the relationship. Additionally, a Bayesian copula selection method was employed to choose the most appropriate copula, and the primary conclusions are as follows:(1) the Bayesian copula selection method based on Bayesian analysis is independent of parameter selections and easy to implement; (2) the identified change points can be summarized as the early 1970s, the late 1980s, and the middle 1990s; (3) from climate change perspective, the combined impact of increasing air temperature and initially decreasing then increasing potential evaporation had a certain effect on these change points; from human activities perspective, the underlying causes of these change points of the early 1970s, the late 1980s, and the middle 1990s were the construction of water projects and soil conservation, the growing effective arable land of the late 1980s and the growing utilization of water resources in the middle 1990s, respectively. The dominant factor influencing the relation between precipitation and runoff is the increasingly intensifying human activities, and this relation is increasingly weakening.

Contributions of climate variability and human activities to the variation of runoff in the Wei River Basin, China

ABSTRACT The Wei River Basin is a typical arid and semi-arid area of the Yellow River Basin. Quantitative estimates of the contributions of human activities and climate changes in this region will enhance our understanding of the local hydrological mechanism and provide an effective reference for other arid and semi-arid areas of the world in local water resource planning and management. The heuristic segmentation method was used to detect the inflection points of the annual runoff. The slope change ratio of accumulative quantity (SCRAQ) method was applied to compute the relative contributions of human activities and climate changes to the decreasing runoff in the whole basin and the basin above Linjiacun. For the whole basin, when 1960–1969 is selected as the baseline, the contributions of climate changes and human activities in 1970–1993 are 26.47% and 73.53%, respectively, those in 1993–2005 are 23.33% and 76.67%, respectively. When 1970–1993 is selected as the baseline, the contributions of climate and human impacts in 1994–2005 are 18.88% and 81.12%, respectively. The results imply that human activities are the dominant driving factors of runoff reduction, whose effect is increasingly intensifying. Furthermore, in order to verify the contributions of human activities and climate changes based on the SCRAQ method, an approach based on the Budyko hypothesis was used in this paper. The results indicate that the contributions of human activities and climate changes based on the SCRAQ method are consistent with those based on the sensitivity-based method. Editor Z.W. Kundzewicz; Associate editor D. Yang

Spatial-temporal change in precipitation patterns based on the cloud model across the Wei River Basin, China

It is of significant importance to investigate the spatial-temporal change in precipitation patterns due to its great effects on droughts, floods, soil erosion and water resource management. A complete investigation of precipitation structure and its distribution pattern based on daily precipitation covering 1960–2005 at 21 meteorological stations in the Wei River Basin has been performed. In order to comprehensively and objectively describe the changing pattern of precipitation, the cloud model is employed to quantitatively analyse the average, uniformity and stability of precipitation. Results indicate the following: (1) the occurrence of different precipitation durations exhibits a positive exponential curve with the decrease in precipitation durations, and 1–3-day events are the predominant precipitation events which have an increasing trend; (2) precipitation and its non-uniformity is increasingly reducing, while its stability increases initially then decreases; (3) mean precipitation reduces from southeast to northwest, and the precipitation of the Guanzhong Plain has a low uniformity and stability due to its location and increasingly intensifying human activities. The cloud model provides a new idea and quantitative measure for the evaluation of the uniformity and stability of precipitation.

Spatial-temporal variation of precipitation concentration and structure in the Wei River Basin, China

It is of significant importance to investigate precipitation structure and precipitation concentration due to their great impact on droughts, floods, soil erosion, as well as water resources management. A complete investigation of precipitation structure and its distribution pattern in the Wei River Basin was performed based on recorded daily precipitation data in this study. Two indicators were used: concentration index based on daily precipitation (CID), to assess the distribution of rainy days, and concentration index based on monthly precipitation (CIM), to estimate the seasonality of the precipitation. Besides, the modified Mann–Kendall trend test method was employed to capture the variation trends of CID and CIM. The results indicate that: (1) the 1–3-day events are the predominant precipitation events in terms of the occurrence and fractional contribution; (2) the obvious differences in the CID of various areas are found in the Wei River Basin, and the high CID values mainly concentrate in the northern basin, conversely, the southern basin has a relatively low CID value; (3) high CIM values are primarily in the western and northern basin, reflecting a remarkable seasonality of precipitation in these regions; and (4) all of the stations show a downward trend of CIM, which indicates that the monthly precipitation distribution tends to be more uniform.

Quantitative estimation on contributions of climate changes and human activities to decreasing runoff in Weihe River Basin, China

Human activities and climate changes are deemed to be two primary driving factors influencing the changes of hydrological processes, and quantitatively separating their influences on runoff changes will be of great significance to regional water resources planning and management. In this study, the impact of climate changes and human activities was initially qualitatively distinguished through a coupled water and energy budgets analysis, and then this effect was further separated by means of a quantitative estimation based on hydrological sensitivity analysis. The results show that: 1) precipitation, wind speed, potential evapotranspiration and runoff have a significantly decreasing trend, while temperature has a remarkably increasing tendency in the Weihe River Basin, China; 2) the major driving factor on runoff decrease in the 1970s and 1990s in the basin is climate changes compared with that in the baseline 1960s, while that in the 1980s and 2000s is human activities. Compared with the results based on Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) model, the contributions calculated in this study have certain reliability. The results are of great significance to local water resources planning and management.

Calculation of the Instream Ecological Flow of the Wei River Based on Hydrological Variation

It is of great significance for the watershed management department to reasonably allocate water resources and ensure the sustainable development of river ecosystems. The greatly important issue is to accurately calculate instream ecological flow. In order to precisely compute instream ecological flow, flow variation is taken into account in this study. Moreover, the heuristic segmentation algorithm that is suitable to detect the mutation points of flow series is employed to identify the change points. Besides, based on the law of tolerance and ecological adaptation theory, the maximum instream ecological flow is calculated, which is the highest frequency of the monthly flow based on the GEV distribution and very suitable for healthy development of the river ecosystems. Furthermore, in order to guarantee the sustainable development of river ecosystems under some bad circumstances, minimum instream ecological flow is calculated by a modified Tennant method which is improved by replacing the average flow with the highest frequency of flow. Since the modified Tennant method is more suitable to reflect the law of flow, it has physical significance, and the calculation results are more reasonable.