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Sensitivity analysis in the evaluation of the effects of land use change in
discharge rate
*FREDDY SORIA
1
, SO KAZAMA
2
, MASAKI SAWAMOTO
1
1. Graduate School of Engineering, Civil Engineering Department, Tohoku University, 6-6-
06, Aobayama, Aoba-ku, Sendai, 980-8579, Japan
2. Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Tohoku University, 6-6-06, Aobayama, Aoba-
ku, Sendai, 980-8579, Japan
*E-mail address of corresponding author: [email protected]
Abstract
Change of conditions and spatial distribution of land use and vegetation is an element that
contributes to climatic evolution, since it has an important effect on the variables of the
hydrological cycle, hence in watersheds response. The potential and sophistication of
hydrological models has greatly increased, and nowadays distributed models are widely
available tools for the analysis of the spatial variability of hydrological processes. Lately the
interest has moved beyond, from the evaluation of changes in the present (i.e. the next 10
years), to the evaluation of the impacts of climate change in the near future (i.e. 10 to 30 years
from the present) and longer-term basis (i.e. few more decades beyond). Climate models have
born from such interest, and as in the case of distributed hydrological models, they have
evolved and improved their capacity to describe the dynamics of events, their resolution has
increased, and has also grown the number of variables and processes predicted. The data
generated by the climate models is used in this manuscript as the input in a particular scheme
of a distributed hydrological model, and the contribution of this paper is to present the
importance of sensitivity analysis of the model components and model output (i.e. discharge
rate) to different scenarios of land use change due to predicted climatic conditions.
To illustrate the ideas, a distributed hydrological model is applied in Caine River basin,Central Bolivia. Future conditions are taken from data produced by the Model for
Interdisciplinary Research on Climate (MIROC 3.2), a coupled general circulation model with
100km spatial resolution, and 3h, 6h to daily resolution for climatic variables. Under such
conditions, variance based analysis is used for the evaluation of model components and
watershed response sensitivity to land use and vegetation change. The scenarios driven after
the conditions established by MIROC’ predictions are compared against observed data, and
are found somehow overestimated, therefore the impact of land use and vegetation change on
watershed response obtained here can be assumed as for the worst case scenario. The
sensitivity analysis showed that the impact of land use and vegetation change scenarios could
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be more critical in locations with convergent and divergent topography, perhaps due to higher
impact of erosive processes.
Keyword:Climate change, distributed modeling, variance based sensitivity analysis.
