Impact of climate change and human activity on the runoff in the upper reaches of the Shiyang River, Northwest China
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Abstract
Based on the hydrological and meteorological data of the upper reaches of Shiyang River basin in Northwest China from 1960 to 2009, this paper analyzed the change in runoff and its related climatic factors, and estimated the contribution of climate change and human activity to runoff change by using the moving T test, cumulative analysis of anomalies and multiple regression analysis. The results showed that temperature revealed a significant increasing trend, and potential evaporation capacity decreased significantly, while precipitation increased insignificantly in the past recent 50 years. Although there were three mutations in 1975, 1990 and 2002 respectively, runoff presented a slight decreasing trend in the whole period. The contributions of climate change and human activity to runoff change during the period of 1976-2009 were 45% and 55% respectively.
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2014. Impact of climate change and human activity on the runoff in the upper reaches of the Shiyang River, Northwest China. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e187v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.187v1Author comment
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Fig 2. Changing trends of temperature (a) precipitation, (b) potential evaporation, and (c) runoff in the upper reaches of Shiyang River Basin
Fig 3. T Statistic graphs（a）and the departure accumulation graphs (b) for the runoff in the upper reaches of Shiyang River Basin
Table 1. Contributions from climate change and human activity to the runoff in the upper reaches of Shiyang River
Additional Information
Competing Interests
There are no competing interests
Author Contributions
Peng Li conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper.
Jianhua Xu conceived and designed the experiments, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper.
Zhongsheng Chen conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper.
Benfu Zhao performed the experiments, analyzed the data.
Funding
There are no funding sources. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
