Journal of Earth Science & Climatic Change
Open Access

Abstract

Statement of the Problem: Changing properties of hydrological processes and related causes are warmly discussed in recent years, and particularly with increasing impacts of intensifying human activities on hydrological processes. There are some scientific issues to be addressed like: More researches addressed impacts of climate changes but not human activities. In this study, we concentrated more on human activities such as land use and land cover changes, GDP, water reservoir and so on. Penmann-Monteith model was used in modeling impacts of climate changes on hydrological variations. New findings were obtained for 2001-2014 and this time interval was usually ignored by previous researches due to shortage of data. Methodology & Theoretical Orientation: Penmann-Monteith model was introduced in modeling impacts of climate changes on hydrological variations. Trends and change points were detected by more than one method to avoid possible uncertainty as a result of single method only. Findings: Hydrological variations are subject to higher sensitivity to climate changes and human activities in northern China than in southern China. More regions with climate changes as dominate factors behind hydrological changes come to be those with human activities as dominant factors. Major factors behind hydrological changes across entire China were differentiated. Conclusion & Significance: Elasticity coefficients of climate change and human activities to stream flow changes in river basins of northern China are significantly larger than those in southern China. This implies higher sensitivity of stream flow changes in northern China than that in southern China. More importance should be attached to water resource managements in northern China. Comparison indicates that fractional contributions of climate change and human activities differentiated by the Budyko based model and hydrological models are similar in terms of magnitude with slight difference. The differences lie in the selection of different evapotranspiration models and time intervals considered in different studies.

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