Effect of Land Use and Climate Change on Runoff in the Dongjiang Basin of South China

Variability and availability of water resources under changing environment in a regional scale have been hot topics in recent years, due to the vulnerability of water resources associated with social and economic development. In this paper, four subbasins in the Dongjiang basin with a significant land use change were selected as case study. Runoffs of the four subbasins were simulated using the SCS monthly model to identify the quantitative impacts of land use and climate change. The results showed that (1), in the Dongjiang basin, temperature increased significantly, evaporation and sunlight decreased strongly, while precipitation showed a nonsignificant increase; (2) since the 1980s, land uses in the Dongjiang basin have experienced a significant change with a prominent increase in urban areas, a moderate increase in farmlands, and a great decrease in forest areas; (3) the SCS monthly model performed well in the four subbasins giving that the more significant land use change in each subbasin, the more runoff change correspondingly; (4) overall, runoff change was contributed half and half by climate change and human activities, respectively, in all the subbasins, in which about 20%~30% change was contributed by land use change

Comparative study on appropriate drought and flood index selection in a tropical farming island in China

The traditional drought and flood analysis method had not fully considered the proportion analysis of different drought and flood grades in the historical years of each rainfall station. This made results unconvincing and made it difficult to deeply understand the characteristics and applicability of various methods. Based on the daily rainfall data of 88 stations in Hainan Island from 1970 to 2019, the China-Z index and the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) were used to compare and analyze the spatial and temporal distribution characteristics of droughts and floods from three different time scales (flood season, non-flood season and the whole year). The results showed that both SPI and China-Z index can well reflect the actual drought and flood situations in Hainan Island. The analysis of the proportions of different drought and flood grades in the historical years of each rainfall station and regional historical drought and flood statistics suggested that the China-Z index had a better indication effect than SPI on the extreme drought and flood grades. The alternation of drought and flood between different eras were obvious. Hainan Island generally presented an east-west reverse drought-flood variation trend, as well as a north-south reverse drought-flood variation trend. The drought and flood in the central mountainous area of Hainan Island had been relatively stable. The distribution pattern of drought and flood had a good spatial consistency in the three periods. On the whole, Hainan Island had shown a trend of flood in the east and drought in the west in the past 50 years

Response of Sediment Load to Hydrological Change in the Upstream Part of the Lancang-Mekong River over the Past 50 Years

Sediment load and its response to the variations of the hydrological elements are important for the healthy utilization of a river. In this study, the response of sediment load to hydrological change was explored in the upstream part of the Lancang-Mekong River, a major transboundary river originating from the Tibetan Plateau and running through China, over the past 50 years. A sediment rating curve for the Jiuzhou Station was developed based on the available SSC-Q (suspended sediment concentration (SSC) and flow) data and trends in annual precipitation, runoff, peak flow (PF), low flow (LF), maximum water level (MWL), and sediment load were analyzed from 1957 to 2006. The correlation analysis method and Random Forest (RF) were adopted to qualitatively and quantitatively quantify the contribution of each hydrological element to the sediment load change. Results indicated that both the runoff and sediment load showed a significantly upward trend, especially after 1979, at the 95% confidence level. The sediment load had significantly positive correlations with runoff, PF, and MWL at the 99% confidence level, respectively. In particular, the sediment load had the largest significant positive correlation with runoff since 1980. Runoff had the largest variable importance to the sediment load change, followed by PF, MWL, precipitation, and LF. The increasing trend in the sediment load was mainly attributed to the increase of runoff in the upstream part of the Lancang-Mekong River since the mid-1980s

Effect of Baseflow Separation on Uncertainty of Hydrological Modeling in the Xinanjiang Model

Based on the idea of inputting more available useful information for evaluation to gain less uncertainty, this study focuses on how well the uncertainty can be reduced by considering the baseflow estimation information obtained from the smoothed minima method (SMM). The Xinanjiang model and the generalized likelihood uncertainty estimation (GLUE) method with the shuffled complex evolution Metropolis (SCEM-UA) sampling algorithm were used for hydrological modeling and uncertainty analysis, respectively. The Jiangkou basin, located in the upper of the Hanjiang River, was selected as case study. It was found that the number and standard deviation of behavioral parameter sets both decreased when the threshold value for the baseflow efficiency index increased, and the high Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency coefficients correspond well with the high baseflow efficiency coefficients. The results also showed that uncertainty interval width decreased significantly, while containing ratio did not decrease by much and the simulated runoff with the behavioral parameter sets can fit better to the observed runoff, when threshold for the baseflow efficiency index was taken into consideration. These implied that using the baseflow estimation information can reduce the uncertainty in hydrological modeling to some degree and gain more reasonable prediction bounds

Modeling of Concrete-Frozen Soil Interface from Direct Shear Test Results

The shear behaviors of concrete-frozen soil interface are important for analyzing the performance of engineering structures buried in the frozen ground. In this paper, a series of direct shear tests were carried out to determine the concrete-soil interface behaviors at different test temperatures (19°C, −1°C, −3°C, and −5°C) and initial water contents (9.2%, 13.1%, 17.1%, and 20.8%) of soils. The interface shear behaviors, including the shear stress versus horizontal displacement, interface cohesion, and interface friction coefficient, were analyzed based on the test results. Then, a simple, nonlinear model was proposed and verified for the interface shear behaviors. The results show that the effect of initial water content and test temperature on the interface shear behavior is significant, and the peak stress increases with the increasing initial water content and decreasing test temperature. The interface cohesion is sensitive to the test temperature and initial water content, while the interface friction coefficient is insensitive to both the factors. The parameters of the simple nonlinear model can be gained by back-analyzing the test results. The predictions made by the proposed model are found to be in good agreement with the experimental results

Improvement of WEAP model considering regional and industrial water distribution priority and its application

Study region: Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area urban agglomeration (GBA). Study focus: Existing Water Evaluation and Planning System (WEAP) lacks consideration of regional and industrial water distribution priority. This study proposes an improved WEAP model by integrating regional and industrial water distribution priority determined by water supply safety. The logistic curve model was introduced for water supply safety evaluation. The improved WEAP model was applied to the water resources allocation of GBA in the year of 2019 and 2030, and the effects of water allocation schemes with different regional and industrial water distribution priorities were compared. New hydrological insights of the region: The results indicate that the water supply safety of each city in the GBA varies with region and industry, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Dongguan have lower degree of domestic and industrial water supply safety. River and reservoir connections are essential to the water supply safety of GBA. The water demands of Shenzhen and Dongguan cannot be satisfied during dry period in 2019, while perfectly satisfied during the dry period in 2030 due to the operation of water transfer projects. The improved WEAP model obtained more reasonable water allocation results, improving the water satisfaction rates of regions with low water supply safety. The research demonstrates the advantage of the improved WEAP model considering regional and industries priority, enhancing the applicability of the WEAP model

Fourier Descriptors Based Expert Decision Classification of Plug Seedlings

To enable automatic transplantation of plug seedlings and improve identification accuracy, an algorithm to identify ideal seedling leaf sets based on Fourier descriptors is developed, and a classification method based on expert system is adopted to improve the identification rate of the plug seedlings. First, the image of the plug seedlings is captured by image acquisition system, followed by application of K-means clustering for image segmentation and binary processing and identification of the ideal seedling leaf set by Fourier descriptors. Then we obtain feature vectors, such as gray scale (R+B+G)/3, hue H, and rectangularity. After that the knowledge model of the plug seedlings is defined, and the inference engine based on knowledge is designed. Finally, the recognizing test is carried out. The success rate of the identification of 10 varieties of plug seedlings from 190 plates is 98.5%. For the same sample, the recognizing rate of support vector machine (SVM) is 85%, the recognizing rate of particle-swarm optimization SVM (PSOSVM) is 87%, the recognizing rate of back propagation neural network (BP) is 63%, and the recognizing rate of Fourier descriptors SVM (FDSVM) is 87%. These results show that our recognition method based on an expert system satisfies the requirements of automatic transplanting