A New Way for Incorporating GCM Information into Water Shortage Projections

Water

Seung Beom Seo²  Young-Oh Kim¹  Cho-Rong Kim³ 

[1] Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Seoul National University, 1 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul 151-741, Korea; E-Mail:;Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27606, USA;Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology, 283 Goyangdae-ro, Ilsanseo-gu, Goyang-si, Gyeonggi-do 411-712, Korea; E-Mail:

关键词: water resources management;    water balance;    Global Circulation Model (GCM);    climate change;    water shortage;   

DOI  :  10.3390/w7052435

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Climate change information is essential for water resources management planning, and the majority of research available uses the global circulation model (GCM) data to project future water balance. Despite the fact that the results of various GCMs are still heterogeneous, it is common to utilize GCM values directly in climate change impact assessment models. To mitigate these limitations, this study provides an alternative methodology, which uses GCM-based data to assign weights on historical scenarios rather than to directly input their values into the assessment models, thereby reducing the uncertainty involved in the direct use of GCMs. Therefore, the real innovation of this study is placed on the use of a new probability weighting scheme with multiple GCMs rather than on the direct input of GCM-driven data. Applied to make future projections of the water shortage in the Han River basin of Korea, the proposed methodology produced conservative but realistic projection results (15% increase) compared to the existing methodologies, which projected a dramatic increase (144%) in water shortage over 10 years. As a result, it was anticipated that the amount of water shortages in the Han River basin would gradually increase in the next 90 years, including a 57% increase in the 2080s.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.