Exploring the impacts of climate change and human activities on future runoff variations at the seasonal scale

Most watersheds around the world have been changing their natural flow patterns because of the coupled effects of climate change and human activities. Understanding the quantitative impacts of projected climate and human factors on future runoff variations is essential for adaptability assessment of water resource management, especially at the seasonal scale where their intra-annual changes are detected. In this study, an extended Budyko framework that combines traditional elasticity and decomposition methods is developed to analyze future seasonal runoff variations. The upper reach of the Hanjiang River basin (UHRB) in China is used as a case study. The case results are quantified and compared with the monthly ABCD model using historical hydrometeorological observations over 1961–2020 and near-future climate projections over 2031–2060 from the multi-model ensemble of the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP3b). We find that: (1) human activities including the operation of the Han-to-Wei inter-basin water transfer (IBWT) and reforestation projects have a substantial negative impact on runoff reduction in this region, accounting for a proportion of ∼70% in energy-limited seasons and ∼65% in water-limited seasons; and (2) the role of climate change projected by ISIMIP3b will intensify in energy-limited seasons, especially under the high-emission scenario with the increasing trend of effective precipitation,. Additionally, the performance of our extended Budyko framework is sufficiently robust to parameter disturbance experiments, indicating its applicability as an alternative for exploring future seasonal runoff variations.