Climate Change Impact Assessment on Freshwater Inflow into the Small Aral Sea
- During the last few decades, the rapid separation of the Small Aral Sea from the isolated basin has changed its hydrological and ecological conditions tremendously. In the present study, we developed and validated the hybrid model for the Syr Darya River basin based on a combination of state-of-the-art hydrological and machine learning models. Climate change impact on freshwater inflow into the Small Aral Sea for the projection period 2007-2099 has been quantified based on the developed hybrid model and bias corrected and downscaled meteorological projections simulated by four General Circulation Models (GCM) for each of three Representative Concentration Pathway scenarios (RCP). The developed hybrid model reliably simulates freshwater inflow for the historical period with a Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency of 0.72 and a Kling-Gupta efficiency of 0.77. Results of the climate change impact assessment showed that the freshwater inflow projections produced by different GCMs are misleading by providing contradictory results for the projectionDuring the last few decades, the rapid separation of the Small Aral Sea from the isolated basin has changed its hydrological and ecological conditions tremendously. In the present study, we developed and validated the hybrid model for the Syr Darya River basin based on a combination of state-of-the-art hydrological and machine learning models. Climate change impact on freshwater inflow into the Small Aral Sea for the projection period 2007-2099 has been quantified based on the developed hybrid model and bias corrected and downscaled meteorological projections simulated by four General Circulation Models (GCM) for each of three Representative Concentration Pathway scenarios (RCP). The developed hybrid model reliably simulates freshwater inflow for the historical period with a Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency of 0.72 and a Kling-Gupta efficiency of 0.77. Results of the climate change impact assessment showed that the freshwater inflow projections produced by different GCMs are misleading by providing contradictory results for the projection period. However, we identified that the relative runoff changes are expected to be more pronounced in the case of more aggressive RCP scenarios. The simulated projections of freshwater inflow provide a basis for further assessment of climate change impacts on hydrological and ecological conditions of the Small Aral Sea in the 21st Century.…
Author details: | Georgy AyzelORCiD, Alexander IzhitskiyORCiD |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.3390/w11112377 |
ISSN: | 2073-4441 |
Title of parent work (English): | Water |
Publisher: | MDPI |
Place of publishing: | Basel |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2019/11/13 |
Publication year: | 2019 |
Release date: | 2020/10/11 |
Tag: | Small Aral Sea; climate change; hydrology; machine learning; modeling |
Volume: | 11 |
Issue: | 11 |
Number of pages: | 19 |
Funding institution: | Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR)Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) [17-05-01175]; RFBRRussian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) [19-35-60005]; Russian Science FoundationRussian Science Foundation (RSF) [16-17-10039]; Ministry of Science and Education of Russia [0149-2019-0003] |
Organizational units: | Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Institut für Umweltwissenschaften und Geographie |
DDC classification: | 5 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik / 55 Geowissenschaften, Geologie / 550 Geowissenschaften |
Peer review: | Referiert |
Publishing method: | Open Access |
Open Access / Gold Open-Access | |
DOAJ gelistet |