Changes in Water Resources Systems:
Methodologies to Maintain Water Security and Ensure Integrated Management
(Proceedings of Symposium HS3006 at IUGG2007, Perugia, July 2007). IAHS Publ. 315, 2007, 295-302
Quantitative
analysis of human impact on river runoff in west Liaohe basin through the
conceptual Xin’anjiang model
LILIANG REN1,
VU VAN NGHI1, FEI YUAN1, CHUNHONG LI2 & JIXIN WANG1
1 State Key Laboratory of Hydrology, Water Resources and Hydraulic Engineering, Hohai University, no. 1 Xikang Road, Nanjing 210098, China
rll@hhu.edu.cn
2 Hydrological Telemetering and Environmental Monitoring Division, NARI Group Corporation, Nanjing 210003, China
Abstract To understand the decreasing trend of river runoff, quantitative analysis of the human impact on decadal surface water resources was carried out using a hydrological model with long term observational hydrological data. The Laohahe River was selected as the study area, which lies in the west upper reach of the Liaohe basin, China. Since the study basin is located in the semihumid region of northeast China where both saturation excess (Dunne) and infiltration excess (Horton) runoffs exist, a parameterization scheme that dynamically represents both Dunne and Horton runoff generation mechanisms was added to the original Xin’anjiang hydrological model. Then this version of the Xin’anjiang model was used to perform hydrological simulations, to separate human impact from the climatic impact on river runoff and to make quantitative analysis of human impact on water resources in the Laohahe watershed. Results show that human activity made river runoff decrease by 1.02, 50.67 and 58.06 mm in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, respectively, and by 97.2 mm in the 1990s in terms of mean annual runoff in the Laohahe watershed.
Key
words climate
change; conceptual model; human activity; river runoff; water resources