Water resources assessment and prediction in China

Abstract

Water resources assessment in China, can be classified into three groups: (i) comprehensive water resources assessment, (ii) annual water resources assessment, and (iii) industrial project water resources assessment. Comprehensive water resources assessment is the conventional assessment where the frequency distribution of water resources in basins or provincial regions are analyzed. For the annual water resources assessment, water resources of the last year in basins or provincial regions are usually assessed. For the industrial project water resources assessment, the water resources situation before the construction of industrial project has to be assessed. To address the climate and environmental changes, hydrological and statistical models are widely applied for studies on assessing water resources changes. For the water resources prediction in China usually the monthly runoff prediction is used. In most low flow seasons, the flow recession curve is commonly used as prediction method. In the humid regions, the rainfall-runoff ensemble prediction (ESP) has been widely applied for the monthly runoff prediction. The conditional probability method for the monthly runoff prediction was also applied to assess next month runoff probability under a fixed initial condition.