Modeling the Impact of Climate Change on Water Availability in the Zarrine River Basin and Inflow to the Boukan Dam, Iran

The impacts of climate change on the water availability of Zarrine River Basin (ZRB), the headwater of Lake Urmia, in western Iran, with the Boukan Dam, are simulated under various climate scenarios up to year 2029, using the SWAT hydrological model. The latter is driven by meteorological variables predicted from MPI-ESM-LR-GCM (precipitation) and CanESM2-GCM (temperature) GCM models with RCP 2.6, RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 climate scenarios, and downscaled with Quantile Mapping (QM) bias-correction and SDSM, respectively. From two variants of QM employed, the Empirical-CDF-QM model decreased the biases of raw GCM- precipitation predictors particularly strongly. SWAT was then calibrated and validated with historical (1981–2011) ZR-streamflow, using the SWAT-CUP model. The subsequent SWAT-simulations for the future period 2012–2029 indicate that the predicted climate change for all RCPs will lead to a reduction of the inflow to Boukan Dam as well as of the overall water yield of ZRB, mainly due to a 23–35% future precipitation reduction, with a concomitant reduction of the groundwater baseflow to the main channel. Nevertheless, the future runoff-coefficient shows a 3%, 2% and 1% increase, as the −2% to −26% decrease of the surface runoff is overcompensated by the named precipitation decrease. In summary, based on these predictions, together with the expecting increase of demands due to the agricultural and other developments, the ZRB is likely to face a water shortage in the near future as the water yield will decrease by −17% to −39%, unless some adaptation plans are implemented for a better management of water resources