Isolating the impacts of land use and climate change on streamflow

Chawla, I.; Mujumdar, P. P.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-19-3633-2015

Articles | Volume 19, issue 8

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-19-3633-2015

© Author(s) 2015. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-19-3633-2015

© Author(s) 2015. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 19, issue 8

Cutting-edge case studies

|

24 Aug 2015

Cutting-edge case studies |

| 24 Aug 2015

Isolating the impacts of land use and climate change on streamflow

I. Chawla and P. P. Mujumdar

Download

Final revised paper (published on 24 Aug 2015)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 20 Feb 2015)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

- Printer-friendly version

- Supplement

SC C272: 'Comments', Ge Sun, 23 Feb 2015
- AC C566: 'Author's Response to Short Comment by G.Sun', Ila Chawla, 15 Mar 2015
RC C600: 'Discussion Comment', Young-Oh Kim, 17 Mar 2015
- AC C607: 'Author's Response to Discussion Comment by Young-Oh Kim (Referee #1)', Ila Chawla, 19 Mar 2015
RC C886: 'Review of Chawla and Mujumdar', Anonymous Referee #2, 07 Apr 2015
- AC C968: 'Author’s Response to Comments by Referee #2', Ila Chawla, 11 Apr 2015

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (06 May 2015) by Thomas Kjeldsen

AR by Ila Chawla on behalf of the Authors (18 May 2015)

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (31 May 2015) by Thomas Kjeldsen

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (09 Jul 2015)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I have read a revised version of the manuscript and have made the following observations which I think the authors need to address before publication can be considered:

Line 14: Remove very first sentence in abstract as it is redundant.

Line 54-56: Added sentences pretty much repeat Line 52-54, so I suggest remove the added paragraph in line 54-56.

Line 66-74: This paragraph does not belong here, maybe move to after line 97. Also, I think it is necessary that the authors review previous results concerning impact of land use and climate on this region. This would help put their findings into context.

Line 89: HESS uses English terminology, so catchment rather than watershed.

Section 2.2: It is a bit strange to discuss data requirements before presenting the VIC model. Maybe move the description of the VIC model from section 2.3 to the start of section 2.2?

Line 213: The introduction argues for the use of physically distributed models, but here by the authors’ own admission they have adopted a ‘semi-distributed’ model. What confidence can the reader now have that the modelled changes in land-use and climate are accurate representations and not suffering from the same ills that the authors attribute to conceptual models in lines 87-88?

Table 3: Report the distribution of land-classes as % rather than km2 as this makes comparison between years more easy to see – especially as the total area seems to change between years (which is a bit strange but probably a data issue).

Line 320: ‘Changes in area observed for classified as urban land appears to be very high, but spatially it occupies very less area in only a small fraction of the entire basin.’

Line 336: missing <space> between P and exhibits.

Line 405-406: This is very selective referencing. I am sure there are other studies that report either no effects or promote land-use change as a mean of managing (reducing) flood risk – a quick search find articles like Naef et al. (2002) and McIntyre et al. (2014) all giving a more complex picture than suggested here. Please be more specific as to what is causing the observed effect. Also, as these effects are really just consequences of the way the VIC model is parameterised, the authors should also assess if these changes are realistic.

Section 3.3.2: As the top-end of the basin is covered by snow (see Figure 7), could the authors explain to what degree will the change in temperature cause in change in runoff from snow melt?

Lines 594-605 are more a summary than a conclusion and should be removed or condensed significantly.

References:

McIntyre, Neil, et al. "Modelling the hydrological impacts of rural land use change." Hydrology Research 45.6 (2014): 737-754.

Naef, Felix, Simon Scherrer, and Markus Weiler. "A process based assessment of the potential to reduce flood runoff by land use change." Journal of Hydrology 267.1 (2002): 74-79.

Hide

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (Editor review) (02 Aug 2015) by Thomas Kjeldsen

AR by Ila Chawla on behalf of the Authors (03 Aug 2015) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (10 Aug 2015) by Thomas Kjeldsen

AR by Ila Chawla on behalf of the Authors (10 Aug 2015) Manuscript

Short summary

A simple hydrologic modeling-based approach to segregate the impacts of land use (LU) and climate change on streamflow is presented. Upper part of Ganga River basin in India is selected as study area for investigation. Results suggest that climate is the dominant contributor to the changes observed in the simulated streamflow. LU did not contribute significantly to the simulated streamflow which could be attributed to smaller spatial extent of sensitive LU categories in the study region.