Title: Drought evolution and driving mechanism analysis in northeast China

Authors: Binbin Huang; Baisha Weng; Xiaohui Zhang

Addresses: Provincial Key Laboratory of Hydrology-Water Resources and Water Environment, Nanchang Institute of Technology, Nanchang 330099, China ' Water Resources Department, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing 100044, China ' Provincial Key Laboratory of Hydrology-Water Resources and Water Environment, Nanchang Institute of Technology, Nanchang 330099, China

Abstract: With the increasing effect from climate changes and human activities drought takes place so frequently that it brings a lot of dangers to the water security and ecological safety. The northeast area of China is the largest national commodity grain base and an important industrial and energy base, but drought is a bottleneck for the development of the area's national economy. It is very important to identify the driving mechanism of generalised drought in this area. The generalised drought driving model in this area can be identified by analysing the climate elements and underlying surface condition evolution rules. Cubic spline function is employed for the trend analysis, as well as the Mann-Kendall method and Yamamoto method for the mutation detection. We also analyse the drought change caused by land use change and the construction of water conservancy and hydropower projects. The driving factors of generalised drought in the northeast of China are natural climate variability (NCV), anthropogenic climate change (ACC), underlying conditions change (UCC) and hydraulic engineering regulation (HER). It can be seen that generalised drought has been affected by ACC since 1982.

Keywords: drought modelling; water resources; evolution rules; drought driving mechanisms; China; drought evolution; water security; ecological safety; land use change; water conservancy projects; hydropower projects; generalised drought; natural climate variability; anthropogenic climate change; underlying conditions change; hydraulic engineering regulations.

DOI: 10.1504/IJW.2015.070358

International Journal of Water, 2015 Vol.9 No.3, pp.248 - 262

Received: 20 Nov 2013
Accepted: 12 Dec 2013
Published online: 03 Jul 2015 *

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