IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jijerp/v16y2019i8p1469-d225836.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Changes in Major Global River Discharges Directed into the Ocean

Author

Listed:
  • Xiaoqing Shi

    (State Key Laboratory of Simulation and Regulation of Water Cycle in River Basin, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing 100038, China
    Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China)

  • Tianling Qin

    (State Key Laboratory of Simulation and Regulation of Water Cycle in River Basin, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing 100038, China)

  • Hanjiang Nie

    (State Key Laboratory of Simulation and Regulation of Water Cycle in River Basin, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing 100038, China
    Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China)

  • Baisha Weng

    (State Key Laboratory of Simulation and Regulation of Water Cycle in River Basin, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing 100038, China)

  • Shan He

    (State Key Laboratory of Simulation and Regulation of Water Cycle in River Basin, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing 100038, China)

Abstract

Under the influence of global climate change, the discharges of major global rivers directed into the ocean have undergone significant changes. To study the trends and causes in discharge variation, we selected 40 large rivers and analyzed their annual discharges near their estuaries from 1960 to 2010. The method of runoff variation attribution analysis based on the Budyko hypothesis for large-scale basins was developed, in which influencing factors of human activities and glacial melting factors were added to the formula. The contribution rate of climate factors and human activities to changes in discharge were quantitatively identified. Climatic factors include precipitation, evapotranspiration and glacial melting. Human activity factors include underlying surface and artificial water transfer. The contribution rate is determined by the elastic coefficient, which is obtained by the ratio of change rate of each factor and the change rate of runoff. The results indicated that the discharges predominantly showed downward trends with a few upward trends. Rivers in North America and Africa showed downward trends, and those in Europe principally showed upward trends. Climate was the main influencing factor of discharges changes, and only approximately 25% of river discharges were greatly affected by human activities. River discharges in 75% of the basins which mainly contains subtropical monsoon humid climate and savanna climate zones showed upward trends. In the four basins which are mainly contains tropical rainforest climate and tropical monsoon climate, they all showed downward trends. The trend of discharges in the temperate monsoon climate, temperate continental climate, and temperate maritime climate cannot be accurately judged because of irregular variation. The discharges in the mid-high latitudinal zones predominantly showed upward trends, while those in the mid-low latitudinal zones with the influence of human activities showed downward trends.

Suggested Citation

  • Xiaoqing Shi & Tianling Qin & Hanjiang Nie & Baisha Weng & Shan He, 2019. "Changes in Major Global River Discharges Directed into the Ocean," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 16(8), pages 1-19, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:16:y:2019:i:8:p:1469-:d:225836
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/8/1469/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/8/1469/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Thomas R. Knutson & Rong Zhang & Larry W. Horowitz, 2016. "Prospects for a prolonged slowdown in global warming in the early 21st century," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 7(1), pages 1-12, December.
    2. R. Quentin Grafton & Jamie Pittock & Richard Davis & John Williams & Guobin Fu & Michele Warburton & Bradley Udall & Ronnie McKenzie & Xiubo Yu & Nhu Che & Daniel Connell & Qiang Jiang & Tom Kompas & , 2013. "Global insights into water resources, climate change and governance," Nature Climate Change, Nature, vol. 3(4), pages 315-321, April.
    3. Markus G. Donat & Andrew L. Lowry & Lisa V. Alexander & Paul A. O'Gorman & Nicola Maher, 2017. "Addendum: More extreme precipitation in the world's dry and wet regions," Nature Climate Change, Nature, vol. 7(2), pages 154-158, February.
    4. Shilong Piao & Philippe Ciais & Yao Huang & Zehao Shen & Shushi Peng & Junsheng Li & Liping Zhou & Hongyan Liu & Yuecun Ma & Yihui Ding & Pierre Friedlingstein & Chunzhen Liu & Kun Tan & Yongqiang Yu , 2010. "The impacts of climate change on water resources and agriculture in China," Nature, Nature, vol. 467(7311), pages 43-51, September.
    5. Jian Liu & Bin Wang & Mark A. Cane & So-Young Yim & June-Yi Lee, 2013. "Divergent global precipitation changes induced by natural versus anthropogenic forcing," Nature, Nature, vol. 493(7434), pages 656-659, January.
    6. E. M. Fischer & R. Knutti, 2016. "Observed heavy precipitation increase confirms theory and early models," Nature Climate Change, Nature, vol. 6(11), pages 986-991, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Xue Yang & Shaochun Huang, 2023. "Attribution assessment of hydrological trends and extremes to climate change for Northern high latitude catchments in Norway," Climatic Change, Springer, vol. 176(10), pages 1-25, October.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. He, Liuyue & Xu, Zhenci & Wang, Sufen & Bao, Jianxia & Fan, Yunfei & Daccache, Andre, 2022. "Optimal crop planting pattern can be harmful to reach carbon neutrality: Evidence from food-energy-water-carbon nexus perspective," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 308(C).
    2. Roobavannan, M. & Kandasamy, J. & Pande, S. & Vigneswaran, S. & Sivapalan, M., 2020. "Sustainability of agricultural basin development under uncertain future climate and economic conditions: A socio-hydrological analysis," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 174(C).
    3. Ding, Yimin & Wang, Weiguang & Song, Ruiming & Shao, Quanxi & Jiao, Xiyun & Xing, Wanqiu, 2017. "Modeling spatial and temporal variability of the impact of climate change on rice irrigation water requirements in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, China," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 193(C), pages 89-101.
    4. Bu, Lingduo & Chen, Xinping & Li, Shiqing & Liu, Jianliang & Zhu, Lin & Luo, Shasha & Lee Hill, Robert & Zhao, Ying, 2015. "The effect of adapting cultivars on the water use efficiency of dryland maize (Zea mays L.) in northwestern China," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 148(C), pages 1-9.
    5. Wenfeng Chi & Yuanyuan Zhao & Wenhui Kuang & Tao Pan & Tu Ba & Jinshen Zhao & Liang Jin & Sisi Wang, 2021. "Impact of Cropland Evolution on Soil Wind Erosion in Inner Mongolia of China," Land, MDPI, vol. 10(6), pages 1-16, June.
    6. Xu, Ying & Findlay, Christopher, 2019. "Farmers’ constraints, governmental support and climate change adaptation: Evidence from Guangdong Province, China," Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, vol. 63(4), October.
    7. Zhongen Niu & Huimin Yan & Fang Liu, 2020. "Decreasing Cropping Intensity Dominated the Negative Trend of Cropland Productivity in Southern China in 2000–2015," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(23), pages 1-14, December.
    8. Yuhong Shuai & Liming Yao, 2021. "Adjustable Robust Optimization for Multi-Period Water Allocation in Droughts Under Uncertainty," Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), Springer;European Water Resources Association (EWRA), vol. 35(12), pages 4043-4065, September.
    9. Zhang, Fengtai & Xiao, Yuedong & Gao, Lei & Ma, Dalai & Su, Ruiqi & Yang, Qing, 2022. "How agricultural water use efficiency varies in China—A spatial-temporal analysis considering unexpected outputs," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 260(C).
    10. Chen, Qi & Qu, Zhaoming & Ma, Guohua & Wang, Wenjing & Dai, Jiaying & Zhang, Min & Wei, Zhanbo & Liu, Zhiguang, 2022. "Humic acid modulates growth, photosynthesis, hormone and osmolytes system of maize under drought conditions," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 263(C).
    11. Kang, Shaozhong & Hao, Xinmei & Du, Taisheng & Tong, Ling & Su, Xiaoling & Lu, Hongna & Li, Xiaolin & Huo, Zailin & Li, Sien & Ding, Risheng, 2017. "Improving agricultural water productivity to ensure food security in China under changing environment: From research to practice," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 179(C), pages 5-17.
    12. Zhihai Yang & Amin W. Mugera & Fan Zhang, 2016. "Investigating Yield Variability and Inefficiency in Rice Production: A Case Study in Central China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 8(8), pages 1-11, August.
    13. Xiaoguang Chen & Madhu Khanna & Lu Yang, 2022. "The impacts of temperature on Chinese food processing firms," Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, vol. 66(2), pages 256-279, April.
    14. Sicong Wang & Changhai Qin & Yong Zhao & Jing Zhao & Yuping Han, 2023. "The Evolutionary Path of the Center of Gravity for Water Use, the Population, and the Economy, and Their Decomposed Contributions in China from 1965 to 2019," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(12), pages 1-20, June.
    15. Minghao Bai & Shenbei Zhou & Ting Tang, 2022. "A Reconstruction of Irrigated Cropland Extent in China from 2000 to 2019 Using the Synergy of Statistics and Satellite-Based Datasets," Land, MDPI, vol. 11(10), pages 1-27, September.
    16. Yang, Wenjie & Li, Yanhang & Jia, Bingli & Liu, Lei & Yuan, Aijing & Liu, Jinshan & Qiu, Weihong, 2024. "Optimized fertilization based on fallow season precipitation and the Nutrient Expert system for dryland wheat reduced environmental risks and increased economic benefits," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 291(C).
    17. Wang, Guangshuai & Liang, Yueping & Zhang, Qian & Jha, Shiva K. & Gao, Yang & Shen, Xiaojun & Sun, Jingsheng & Duan, Aiwang, 2016. "Mitigated CH4 and N2O emissions and improved irrigation water use efficiency in winter wheat field with surface drip irrigation in the North China Plain," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 163(C), pages 403-407.
    18. Yoro Diallo & Sébastien Marchand & Etienne Espagne, 2019. "Impacts of extreme events on technical efficiency in Vietnamese agriculture," CERDI Working papers halshs-02080285, HAL.
    19. Cao, Meng & Chen, Min & Liu, Ji & Liu, Yanli, 2022. "Assessing the performance of satellite soil moisture on agricultural drought monitoring in the North China Plain," Agricultural Water Management, Elsevier, vol. 263(C).
    20. Xu, Zhihao & Yin, Xinan & Yang, Zhifeng & Cai, Yanpeng & Sun, Tao, 2016. "New model to assessing nutrient assimilative capacity in plant-dominated lakes: Considering ecological effects of hydrological changes," Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 332(C), pages 94-102.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:16:y:2019:i:8:p:1469-:d:225836. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.