Impact of Climate Change Using Trend Analysis of Rainfall, RRL AWBM Toolkit, Synthetic and Arbitrary Scenarios

Abstract

The integrated approach for assessment of the impact of climate change is important, as climate impacts are likely to transcend sectoral or regional boundaries, with impacts of change in hydrological and geological behaviour of one sector affecting the behaviour of another or simultaneously any other sector, or region, to respond. Modelling is often used by hydrologists in the analysis of empirical data to gain insights into the underlying dynamics of simulated runoff and its trend changing pattern. Thus, these models extrapolate from a climate-related (usually temperature-related) relationship derived by observations and experiment. The climate changes have adverse and drastic impacts on climate-sensitive sectors such as water resources, agriculture and ultimately livelihood and economy of the people. Thus consequently increase or decrease in temperature, rainfall and other climatic parameters due to climate change affect the river discharge, flood, reservoir storages, groundwater levels, soil moisture, evapotranspiration, crop production, sea levels etc. Keeping this insight patches of major changes from the whole study area were selected to assess the intensity of rainfall, discharge and the incremental impact of rainfall. The temporal analysis in selected patches revealed that increment and decrement in the study area simultaneously affect the runoff by the same proportion. The trend generated through the Mann-Kendall test not only helped in assessing the impact of climate change but also identified its causative actors. The results of the study can effectively be utilized for setting priorities of hydrological behaviour in different geographical regions at various scales.