Assessment of Climate Change Effects on the Annual Water Yield of Rivers: A Case Study of Gorganroud River, IRAN

Climate change means a significant change in the long-term weather of a region in comparison with what has been observed during a long term period. Precipitation and minimum and maximum temperature are three variables which are affected directly by the climate change. Furthermore, the water yield of a river is one of the most important hydrological variables of a Basin which is affected by variations of the climate variables. In this research, the mentioned variables have been used to assess the climate change, and precipitation, the most important factor affecting water yield, has been used to investigate the climate change effect on the water yield of the river. A conditional probability distribution function has been used to determine the quantity of the annual water yield of a river. This approach gives a variation range demonstrating the error existing in the results. In this paper, the Gorganroud basin is selected as the case study. Precipitation and minimum and maximum temperature of the basin during the 1977-2006 have been compared with the output of scenarios of all Global Circulation models to select the most appropriate model to forecast the future climate of this basin. The obtained results show that the scenario B2 of HadCM3 model is the most appropriate scenario for this case study. If this scenario happen in the next 30 years, the quantity of water yield in Tamr station adjacent to Gorganroud river, located upstream of Boostan, Golestan and Voshmgir dams, will decrease 1.38% and 1.33% in water yield volume of return periods of 50 and 100 years, respectively. But, if the existing trend in historical data continues in the next 30 years, the quantity of water yield at this station will increase 14.94% and 14.55% in water yield volume of return periods of 50 and 100 years, respectively.