Precipitation Trends and Alteration in Wei River Basin: Implication for Water Resources Management in the Transitional Zone between Plain and Loess Plateau, China
2019
Ci Li | Hongbo Zhang | Xinghui Gong | Xiaowei Wei | Jiantao Yang
Precipitation plays a critical role in water resources management, and trend changes and alterations thereof are crucial to regional or basin water security, disaster prevention, and ecological restoration under a changing environment. In order to explore the implications of precipitation variation for water resources management, taking the Wei River Basin (a transitional zone between the Guanzhong Plain and Loess Plateau) as an example, this paper proposes an index system, namely the index of precipitation alteration (IPA), to evaluate changes in precipitation and investigate their potential influence on water resources management. The system includes 17 indicators gained from observed daily rainfall, involving some structural precipitation indicators describing the precipitation patterns and some functional precipitation indicators influencing utilization of watershed water resources. Non-parametric Mann-Kendall (MK) statistical test is employed to identify the IPA trend change, and range of variability approach is used to evaluate the variation of IPA. The analysis results in Wei River Basin show that IPA varies with different spatial and temporal distributions. Overall, although the annual total precipitation declined in the study area, the frequency of extreme events was increased during 1955−2012. In the face of severe climate change patterns, it is necessary to establish the precipitation index to evaluate the change of precipitation and to provide useful information for future precipitation assessments.
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