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Many semi-arid regions are characterised by water scarcity and vulnerability of natural resources, pronounced climatic variability and social stress. Integrated studies including climatotogy, hydrology, and socio-econornic studies are required both for analysing the dynamic natural conditions and to assess possible strategies to make semi-arid regions Less vulnerable to the present and changing climate. The model introduced here dynamically describes the retationships between climate forcing, water availability, agriculture and selected societal processes. The model has been tailored to simulate the rather complex situation in the semi-and north-eastern Brazil in a quantitative manner including the sensitivity to external forcing, such as climate change. The selected results presented show the general functioning of the integrated model, with a primary focus on climate change impacts. It becomes evident that due to Large differences in regional climate scenarios, it is still impossible to give quantitative values for the most probable development, e.g., to assign probabilities to the simulated results. However, it becomes clear that water is a very crucial factor, and that an efficient and ecologically sound water management is a key question for the further development of that semi-arid region. The simulation results show that, independent of the differences in climate change scenarios, rain-fed farming is more vulnerable to drought impacts compared to irrigated farming. However, the capacity of irrigation and other water infrastructure systems to enhance resilience in respect to climatic fluctuations is significantly constrained given a significant negative precipitation trend. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
In recent years, urban and rural flash floods in Europe and abroad have gained considerable attention because of their sudden occurrence, severe material damages and even danger to life of inhabitants. This contribution addresses questions about possibly changing environmental conditions which might have altered the occurrence frequencies of such events and their consequences. We analyze the following major fields of environmental changes.
Altered high intensity rain storm conditions, as a consequence of regionalwarming; Possibly altered runoff generation conditions in response to high intensity rainfall events; Possibly altered runoff concentration conditions in response to the usage and management of the landscape, such as agricultural, forest practices or rural roads; Effects of engineering measures in the catchment, such as retention basins, check dams, culverts, or river and geomorphological engineering measures.
We take the flash-flood in Braunsbach, SW-Germany, as an example, where a particularly concise flash flood event occurred at the end of May 2016. This extreme cascading natural event led to immense damage in this particular village. The event is retrospectively analyzed with regard to meteorology, hydrology, geomorphology and damage to obtain a quantitative assessment of the processes and their development.
The results show that it was a very rare rainfall event with extreme intensities, which in combination with catchment properties and altered environmental conditions led to extreme runoff, extreme debris flow and immense damages. Due to the complex and interacting processes, no single flood cause can be identified, since only the interplay of those led to such an event. We have shown that environmental changes are important, but-at least for this case study-even natural weather and hydrologic conditions would still have resulted in an extreme flash flood event.
A methodology is presented to assess the impact of reservoir silting oil water availability for semiarid environments, applied to seven representative watersheds in the state of Ceara, Brazil. Water yield is computed using stochastic modelling for several reliability levels and water yield reduction is quantified for the focus areas. The yield-volume elasticity concept, which indicates the relative yield reduction in terms of relative storage capacity of the reservoirs, is presented and applied. Results chow that storage capacity was reduced by 0.2% year(-1) due to silting, that the risk of water shortage almost doubled in less than 50 years for the most critical reservoir, and that reduction of storage capacity had three times more impact oil yield reduction than the increase in evaporation. Average 90% reliable yield-volume elasticity was 0.8, which means that the global water yield (Q(90)) in Ceara is expected to diminish yearly by 388 L s(-1) due to reservoir silting
Veränderung der Abflüsse
(2005)
Probleme, Grenzen und Herausforderungen der hydrologischen Modellierung: Wasserhaushalt und Abfluss
(2004)
Approximation of Groundwater - Surface Water - Interactions in a Mesoscale Lowland River Catchment
(2004)
Stofftransport in einem Lösseinzugsgebiet: Experimentelle Evidenz und numerische Modellierung.
(2004)
The spatial variability of landscape features such as topography, soils and vegetation defines the spatial pattern of hydrological state variables like soil moisture. Spatial variability thereby controls the functional behaviour of the landscape in terms of its runoff response. A consequence of spatial variability is that exchange processes between landscape patches can occur at various spatial scales ranging from the plot to the basin scale. In semi-arid areas, the lateral redistribution of surface runoff between adjacent landscape patches is an important process. For applications to large river basins of 10(4)-10(5) km(2) in size, a multi-scale landscape discretization scheme is presented in this paper. The landscape is sub-divided into modelling units within a hierarchy of spatial scale levels. By delineating areas characterized by a typical toposequence, organised and random variability of landscape characteristics is captured in the model. Using runoff-runon relationships with transition frequencies based on areal fractions of modelling units, lateral surface and subsurface water fluxes between modelling units at the hillslope scale are represented. Thus, the new approach allows for a manageable description of interactions between fine-scale landscape features for inclusion in coarse-scale models. Model applications for the State of Ceara (148,000 km(2)) in the north- east of Brazil demonstrate the importance of taking into account landscape variability and interactions between landscape patches in a semi-arid environment. Using mean landscape characteristics leads to a considerable underestimation of infiltration-excess surface runoff and total simulated runoff. Re-infiltration of surface runoff and lateral redistribution processes between landscape patches cause a reduction of runoff volumes at the basin scale and contribute to the amplification of variations in runoff volumes relative to variations in rainfall volumes for semi-arid areas. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
Simple water balance modelling of surface reservoir systems in a large data-scarce semiarid region
(2004)
Water resources in dryland areas are often provided by numerous surface reservoirs. As a basis for securing future water supply, the dynamics of reservoir systems need to be simulated for large river basins, accounting for environmental change and an increasing water demand. For the State of Ceara in semiarid Northeast Brazil, with several thousands of reservoirs, a simple deterministic water balance model is presented. Within a cascade-type approach, the reservoirs are grouped into six classes according to storage capacity, rules for flow routing between reservoirs of different size are defined, and water withdrawal and return flow due to human water use is accounted for. While large uncertainties in model applications exist, particularly in terms of reservoir operation rules, model validation against observed reservoir storage volumes shows that the approach is a reasonable simplification to assess surface water availability in large river basins. The results demonstrate the large impact of reservoir storage on downstream flow and stress the need for a coupled simulation of runoff generation, network redistribution and water use