Watershed Management under Climate Change for Upper Yamuna River Basin in India using SWAT Model

Abstract

Worldwide climate change is supposed to introduce various provocations to water resource management. Climate change has ability to intensify the magnitude of flood and drought episodes, as well as their amplitude. Climate change has the potential to exacerbate hydrological extremes. It is crucial to forecast changes to hydrological regimes and determine the level of uncertainty around them in order to increase resilience and prepare for future changes. In order to enlighten long-term estimates, considerable attention is required to sustain the available water resources and for creation of potential water infrastructure expected to last for up to a century or more. To address these provocations a hydrological structure was laid out by calibrating and validating with the river discharge data of SWAT model for Upper Yamuna River Basin. In the present study, SWAT model is applied in the Upper Yamuna River basin in India and calibrated for 23 years and validation for 6 years using GEOGloWS simulated historical streamflow data available for restricted or data-scarce region. This model showed weak performance (NSE: 0.22 and R- squared 0.59), whereas, the another model simulated in the same area was calibrated for 12 years and validation for 7 years using observed discharge data, which showed a good performance of the SWAT Model regarding water balance of the project area (R2 has come out as 0.71 for Calibration period (2002-2013) and 0.91 for Validation period (2014-2020). Spatial climatic data was further used to analyze the future climatic projection scenarios for Base line period, Mid Century and End Century wherein RCPs 2.6, 4.5 and 8.5 were applied. It is observed that the average annual minimum temperature is found to be increased 1.4and#8304;C in Mid century and 2.2and#8304;C in End Century from the Base line Scenario while the average annual maximum temperature is found to be increased 1.5and#8304;C in Mid century and 2.1and#8304;C in End Century from the Base line Scenario.