Hydroclimatic change driven by land-water-use developments:the case oftransboundary Sava River Catchment, South Eastern Europe
2013 (English)Other (Other academic)
Abstract [en]
Growing human demands for water, food and energy have led to extensive use and modification of world waterbodies, for instance by construction of dams, reservoirs and channels for hydropower purposes. In this studywe use the transboundary Sava River Catchment (SRC) in South Eastern Europe, as field case for investigatinglong-term hydroclimatic changes and their relation to regional hydropower and associated land-water-usedevelopments. We find sustained increase in average annual evapotranspiration, and decrease in average annualrunoff and temporal runoff variability as hydropower production increased in the SRC parts with the greatest suchdevelopments during the 20th century. Purely climate-driven estimates of change in evapotranspiration and runoffcannot capture these changes, which are apparently related to the land and water use changes associated withhydropower development. Direct comparisons with corresponding results from other world regions and globalestimates show consistent cross-regional results, supporting generalization of obtained specific numerical resultsand the used analysis approach on different scales and across different parts of the world.With regard to specific results, the estimated average increase of actual evapotranspiration by hydropowerrelated/reflected land-water-use changes in SRC (sub)catchments with considerable hydropower developmentis 37 mm/year (for their average annual hydropower production of 217 MWh/km2). This result is for instanceconsistent with a corresponding estimate of evapotranspiration increase by Destouni et al (2012) of 57 mm/year(for their investigated Swedish hydropower catchments with average annual hydropower production of 322MWh/km2).The SRC case study, of an area of recent political and social instability with less than ideal conditions regardingenvironmental monitoring, represents a methodological success by showing that, even in such a complicatedpart of the world, relevant data series can be compiled for detecting and recognizing hydro-climatic changes andtheir possible land-water-use drivers. The used catchment-wise methodological approach offers opportunities forimproved assessment of drivers and hydro-climatic changes across different scales, and for further development ofclimate and Earth system models based on this improved knowledge.
Place, publisher, year, pages
EGU, 2013.
Keywords [en]
hydroclimate, catchment, evapotranspiration, runoff, runoff variability, hydropower, water use, land-use, land-cover, long-term change, regional change, global change, change drivers, Sava River
National Category
Engineering and Technology
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-126920OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-126920DiVA, id: diva2:642580
Projects
VR; project number 2009-3221
Funder
Swedish Research Council, 2009-3221
Note
QC 20140407
2013-08-222013-08-222022-06-23Bibliographically approved