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How Does Global Warming Accelerate the Hydrological Cycle in the East Asian Monsoon Region? Atmospheric- and Terrestrial Moisture Pathways Analysis in a Regional Earth System Model

Subject Area Hydrogeology, Hydrology, Limnology, Urban Water Management, Water Chemistry, Integrated Water Resources Management
Atmospheric Science
Term from 2018 to 2022
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 391681070
 
Final Report Year 2024

Final Report Abstract

Global warming is assumed to accelerate the global water cycle. Accordingly, at the regional scale, this may modify weather regimes and likely increase the number of hydrometeorological extreme events. In the case of the East Asian monsoon region, such changes have already been observed and are expected to intensify, which is a potential threat for the regional economy. Moreover, water resources in the region are heavily affected by anthropogenic activity, which further modifies the regional hydrological cycle. However, the detailed mechanism liking the global warming and anthropogenic activities to changes in the East Asian monsoonal circulation, a regional acceleration of the hydrological cycle and an increase of extreme event is not fully understood yet. It was therefore the objectives to enhance a fully coupled regional atmospherehydrology model system with the effect of anthropogenic activities on water resources, to develop a new method to evaluate jointly the atmospheric and soil moisture pathways in the enhanced regional Earth System Model, and to investigate changes in the residence times of water in the atmosphere and the soils due to the effects of additional considerations of lateral water flow, water resources management (reservoir regulation and irrigation practice), land-use change, and global warming. To this end, we developed a calibration-free reservoir network module and a crop-classified dynamic irrigation practice module in the regional atmospherichydrological modeling framework, namely Weather Research and Forecasting Model – Hydrologic Model System WRF-HMS. Moreover, we implemented the age-weighted evapotranspiration partitioning tagging algorithm into the enhanced WRF-HMS model and developed the precipitation tagging algorithm in WRF-Hydro. The newly developed modeling system has been intensively applied in the Poyang Lake basin which is located in southern China and covers an area of about 160000 km2. The added-values, potentials, and benefits of the newly extended regional Earth System model were demonstrated allowing investigations of the atmospheric-terrestrial water cycle response to anthropogenic actives and global warming. Due to the successful development of the human activities represented and water tracking-enabled regional Earth System model, additional applications have been successfully achieved in different regions of China, such as Hanjiang River basin, the Yalong River basin, the Three-river Headwaters region. We decided to test, apply and validate it further for other basins in different regions and climate zones of the world. Surprises encountered in the course of the project and in the results obtained are as follows: • ~80 million people in China have faced increasing water resources challenges in the past due to the significantly weakened reservoir regulation of the water cycle. • The strength of the groundwater feedback is not altered by the consideration of reservoir regulation for the Poyang Lake basin and the estimated irrigated water demand in the basin will not increase under the RCP8.5 warming scenario. • WRF reduces the wet bias of spring precipitation by around 70% compared to ERA5 for the Three-river Headwaters region. • Global warming reduces the age of tagged water vapor (-6%) and condensed moisture (-5%) in the atmosphere of the basin, but prolongs the age of tagged precipitation (+19%) over the land that is partly attributed to slower fallout of precipitating moisture components in the atmosphere under global warming.

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