Issue |
E3S Web Conf.
Volume 98, 2019
16th International Symposium on Water-Rock Interaction (WRI-16) and 13th International Symposium on Applied Isotope Geochemistry (1st IAGC International Conference)
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Article Number | 06014 | |
Number of page(s) | 5 | |
Section | Geochemical Cycles of Elements and Global Environmental Changes | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/20199806014 | |
Published online | 07 June 2019 |
Climate change impact assessment on water security in South Africa: A case study in a semi-arid river basin
Department of Civil Engineering, Central University of Technology, Free State, Private Bag X20539, Bloemfontein 9300, South Africa
* Corresponding author: ywoyessa@cut.ac.za
The main aim of this paper is to assess the impact of regional climate change scenarios on the availability of water resources in a semi-arid river basin in South Africa using a hydrological model called Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). In this paper, climate change data was derived from two downscaling approaches, namely statistical downscaling experiment (SDE) and dynamic downscaling (CORDEX). These were derived from the GCM simulations of the Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project Phase-5 (CMIP5) and across two greenhouse gas emission scenarios known as Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) 4.5 and 8.5. The spatial resolution of the dataset for the SDE method is 25 km × 25 km and 50 km × 50 km for the CORDEX method. Six GCM models were used for SDE set of data and four for the CORDEX set of data. SWAT model was run using these data for a period of up to mid-century (2020 – 2050) for SDE and for a period of up to the end of this century (2020 – 2100) for CORDEX data. The results were then compared with long-term historical data (1975-2005). Comparison of measured data with simulated historical data showed strong correlation (R2 = 0.95 for SDE data and R2 = 0.92 for CORDEX data), which is indicative of the reliability of projected future climate.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2019
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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