Estimating the spatio-temporal distribution of surface water availability across India

Abstract:

Quantifying the spatio-temporal variation of future surface water availability across India is critical for water resources planning and management in the water stressed region. However, this remains a challenge as long-term streamflow data is scarce and there is significant uncertainty regarding unmonitored withdrawals. We present a framework to estimate long-term (surface) water availability and its vulnerability to climate change across India using hydro-climatic variables based on long-term precipitation, potential and actual evapotranspiration. We derive estimates of actual evapotranspiration through a probabilistic Budyko framework which further allows us to obtain uncertainty bounds on surface water availability. We define vulnerability as a relative change in long-term surface water availability for a unit change in long-term precipitation. Based on this, we present vulnerability maps for India which shows the spatio-temporal variation of vulnerability of surface water resources to climate change across India.