Faculty Publications
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Item Impacts of climate change on varied River-Flow regimes of southern india(American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) onlinejls@asce.org, 2017) Mudbhatkal, A.; Raikar, R.V.; Venkatesh, B.; Mahesha, A.This paper assesses the possible impact of climate change on the hydrology of the subhumid and perhumid river regimes originating from the western mountain range (Western Ghats) of India. The modified Mann-Kendall test evaluates the trend of observed data (1975-2004) and RCP 4.5 data (2006-2070) of climatic variables. The results indicate a decreasing trend for annual rainfall over the Malaprabha River catchment (26 mm per year at the 5% significance level), whereas no trend is observed over the Netravathi River catchment at the 10% level. Indian southwestern monsoon rainfall shows a decreasing trend from 84 to 80% of total rainfall in the Malaprabha River catchment and from 80 to 77% in the Netravathi River catchment. Summer rains are found to be increasing in the Malaprabha River catchment (3-4.5% of total rainfall), whereas there is no significant trend for the Netravathi River catchment. Furthermore, the postmonsoon rainfall also shows a significant increase in the Malaprabha catchment (40 mm per decade at the 5% significance level) and the Netravathi catchment (30 mm per decade at the 10% significance level). The Netravathi River shows a decreasing trend for annual flow (0.22 Mm3 per year at the 10% significance level). However, for both catchments the temperature is found to be increasing by 0.2-0.8°C per decade. The soil and water assessment tool (SWAT) model is used to simulate the river catchments and exhibits a Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency of 0.831 and 0.857 for the Malaprabha and Netravathi River catchments, respectively. In addition, a decreasing trend in the high flow is estimated for Netravathi, whereas the trend is increasing for Malaprabha. Thus the impacts of climate change over the Western Ghats are very evident, but the flow of each river responds differently. © 2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.Item Bias correction methods for hydrologic impact studies over India's Western Ghat basins(American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) onlinejls@asce.org, 2018) Mudbhatkal, A.; Mahesha, M.The regional climate models (RCMs) used in the analysis of the impact of climate variables on the hydrology of river basins needs appropriate preprocessing (bias correction) to represent and reproduce future climate with a fair degree of accuracy. The performance of bias corrections methods was assessed in this investigation on the basis of their ability to minimize error on climate variables and streamflow. This work compares the performance of five bias correction methods applied for precipitation and four methods for temperature in modeling the hydrology of the river catchments of theWestern Ghats of India. TheWestern Ghats are a mountainous forest range along the entire west coast of India that plays a major role in the distribution of Indian monsoon rains. Simulations were used to evaluate the performance of the bias correction methods. Using raw RCM, bias corrected precipitation and temperature time series, streamflows were estimated by the soil and water assessment tool (SWAT) hydrological model. The results indicated that the raw RCM-simulated precipitation was biased by 42% and the temperature was biased by 12% across the catchments investigated. Subsequently, a bias of 65% was found in the streamflow. The performance of the delta change correction method was consistently better for precipitation (with Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency, NSE > 0.75 for 5 catchments) and temperature (NSE = 1) compared with other methods. Good performance was observed between the observed and bias corrected streamflow (daily time scale) for the catchments Purna (NSE = 0.97), Ulhas (NSE = 0.64), Aghanashini (NSE = 0.82), Netravathi (NSE = 0.89), and Chaliyar (NSE = 0.90); low performance with an NSE of 0.3 was observed for the catchments Kajvi and Vamanapuram. The methods failed for Malaprabha and Tunga catchments. The results indicate that the delta change correction method performed best in analyzing the hydrological impact of climate variables on the windward side of Western Ghats of India. © 2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.