Projected Climate Change Impacts on a Mediterranean Catchment under Different Irrigation Scenarios

Abstract:

In semi-arid regions, irrigation is often needed for cultivation and greatly impacts the water cycle of agricultural catchments. It is important to investigate the effects of climate change in these settings under consideration of future agricultural management and irrigation needs. However, quantifying how irrigation influences climate-change effects is still a challenge. Understanding the differences in climate-change sensitivity between irrigated and non-irrigated catchments would allow refining regional-scale assessments of climate-change impacts.

We investigated a catchment in north-east Spain which had not been irrigated prior to 2006 and where 54% of the land is now converted to irrigated agriculture. Data on hydraulic heads, discharge, and irrigation were used to simulate coupled surface-subsurface flow in the catchment, using the pde-based model HydroGeoSphere. The model performs well for both irrigated and non-irrigated periods. To predict future climate scenarios in the region, we use four regional climate models from the ENSEMBLE project (P.van der Linden and J.Mitchell, ENSEMBLES: Climate Change and its Impacts [...], Met Office Hadley Center, 2009) and three downscaling methods. We further investigated four irrigation scenarios, based on projected potential evapotranspiration.

Preliminary results show a shift in the hydrological regime of the catchment under future climate scenarios. Under irrigation, the variability of low-flow discharge increases in future climate. On the contrary, peak flows increase and hydraulics heads decrease significantly in the non-irrigated scenarios. For example, annual maximum flow increases by about 15 % in the non-irrigated case but there is only little change in the corresponding irrigated scenarios. Sensitivity to projected precipitation changes is higher without irrigation, while potential evapotranspiration has more importance for irrigated catchments.