Sensitivity of the Keum River basin to climate change

Abstract

This study reports an examination of the sensitivity of water resources in the Keum River basin to climate change. Assuming a doubling in CO2 concentrations, a cooperative study provided four climate change scenarios for this study, which have been translated into temperature and precipitation scenarios on a basin scale. The study utilized these temperature and precipitation data for each climate change scenario as inputs to the NWS-PC model to generate the corresponding streamflow scenario over the Keum River basin. A reservoir simulation model for the Dae-Chung Dam in the Keum River basin has been developed with an object-oriented simulation environment, STELLA. For each streamflow scenario, the performance of the reservoir was assessed in terms of reliability, resiliency, and vulnerability. Although the simulation results are heavily dependent on the choice of the climate change scenarios, the following conclusions can be clearly concluded: (1) the future streamflow over the Dae-Chung Dam tends to decease during the dry period, which seriously increases competitive water use issues and (2) flood control issues predominate under the 2CO2-High case.