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Drought on the North American high plains: modeling effects of vegetation, temperature and rainfall perturbations on regional hydrology
Hein, Annette
Hein, Annette
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2018
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Drought is a natural disaster that may become more common in the future under climate change. It involves changes to temperature, precipitation, land cover or all three variables. A high-resolution integrated hydrologic model of the High Plains explores the individual importance of each of these factors and the feedbacks between them. The model was constructed using ParFlow-CLM, which represents surface and subsurface processes in detail with physically based equations. Numerical experiments were run to perturb vegetation, precipitation and temperature separately, as well as a baseline scenario with no changes and two multi-factor scenarios. Less precipitation caused larger anomalies in evapotranspiration, soil moisture, stream flow and water table levels than did increased temperature or disturbed land cover. However, many mechanisms including lateral flow, antecedent soil moisture and scaling affected the details of model response, thus making the behavior of multi-factor runs complex.
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