Impact of Climate Change on the Water Resources of Zayandeh Rud Basin

In this study the impact of climate change on temperature, rainfall and river flows of the Zayandeh Rud basin under two climate change scenarios for two periods (2010-2039 and 2070-2099) are investigated. For the evaluation of future climate change impact on stream flow to Chadegan reservoir, the global circulation model (GCM) outputs of the HadCM3 model (monthly temperature and precipitation) with two scenarios, A2 and B2, are obtained and downscaled to the local level for the selected time periods. The results indicate that the annual average of precipitation decreases and temperature increases for both periods that are more pronounced for the period 2079-2099. Such that 10% to 16% decrease in precipitation and 3.2 to 4.6ºC increases in temperature can be anticipated for scenarios A2 and B2, respectively. To predict future stream flow changes due to climate change, artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been applied and trained by the several input models and architectures for rainfall-runoff simulation. The results indicate that the maximum of 5.8% decrease in the annual flows. Comparison of the two scenarios indicates the more critical situation in scenario A2 for the basin.