Assessing Climate Change Impacts on Streamflow, Sediment and Nutrient Loadings of the Minija River (Lithuania): A Hillslope Watershed Discretization Application with High-Resolution Spatial Inputs
1
Marine Research Institute, Klaipeda University, 92294 Klaipeda, Lithuania
2
ISMAR-CNR, Institute of Marine Sciences, 30122 Venezia, Italy
3
Department of Inland Water Resources and Management, Faculty of Aquatic Sciences, Istanbul University, 34134 Istanbul, Turkey
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Water 2019, 11(4), 676; https://doi.org/10.3390/w11040676
Received: 5 February 2019 / Revised: 26 March 2019 / Accepted: 28 March 2019 / Published: 1 April 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Diffuse Water Pollution)
Abstract
In this paper we focus on the model setup scheme for medium-size watershed with high resolution, multi-site calibration, and present results on the possible changes of the Minija River in flow, sediment load, total nitrogen (TN), and total phosphorus (TP) load in the near-term (up to 2050) and long-term (up to 2099) in the light of climate change (RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 scenarios) under business-as-usual conditions. The SWAT model for the Minija River basin was setup by using the developed Matlab (SWAT-LAB) scripts for a highly customized watershed configuration that addresses the specific needs of the project objective. We performed the watershed delineation by combining sub-basin and hillslope discretization schemes. We defined the HRUs by aggregating the topographic, land use, soil, and administrative unit features of the area. A multisite manual calibration approach was adopted to calibrate and validate the model, achieving good to satisfactory results across different sub-basins of the area for flow, sediments and nutrient loads (TP and TN). After completing the climate change scenario calculations, we found that a net decrease of flow (up to 35%), TN (up to 34%), and TP (up to 50%) loads are projected under both scenarios. Furthermore, we explored the changes in the streamflow composition and provide new insight on the reason of projected nutrient load decrease. View Full-TextKeywords:
hillslope discretization; SWAT model; water quality; Minija River watershed; climate change
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Čerkasova, N.; Umgiesser, G.; Ertürk, A. Assessing Climate Change Impacts on Streamflow, Sediment and Nutrient Loadings of the Minija River (Lithuania): A Hillslope Watershed Discretization Application with High-Resolution Spatial Inputs. Water 2019, 11, 676.
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