Ubiquitous Increases in Streamflow and Flooding Magnitude Across the Yellow River Basin

Abstract

Abstract Global human‐induced warming has intensified water circulation in the atmospheric environment and altered the streamflow generation regime. The VIC hydrological model approach for impact assessment of climate change and human activities mainly focuses on variations in streamflow, but ignores other critical flooding characteristics induced by extreme streamflow, especially bivariate flooding characteristics. In this work, the copula functions are employed to structure the flooding risk under the shared socioeconomic pathway (SSP) across the Yellow River basin (YRB). This is based on the multi‐model ensemble (MME) and Delta downscaling outputs (Delta‐MME) of the CMIP6 global climate models (GCMs), as well as the flooding characteristics simulated by VIC hydrological model. Compared to the reference period (1995–2014), Delta‐MME reveals a significant warming and humidifying trend under three SSPs over the YRB. Despite uncertainties originating from climate variables and hydrological model, multiple findings underscore the substantial influence of climate change on the flooding generation regime in YRB. This includes: (a) an increase in the streamflow under all SSPs; (b) a larger flooding peak (Q) and volume (W) under SSP585, with Q and W at the Huayuankou hydrologic station (HYK) increasing by 52.7% and 44.8%, respectively; (c) an advancement in the bivariate flooding risk, particularly in SSP585 where flooding co‐occurrence return period at HYK may be more than 50 times earlier. This study underscores that the urgent need to enhance social resilience to climate change in the YRB.

Keywords

• streamflow
• flood risk
• Yellow River basin
• CMIP6
• VIC hydrological model