Anthropogenic climate change has influenced global river flow seasonality

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Wang, Hong; Liu, Junguo; Klaar, Megan; Chen, Aifang; Gudmundsson, Lukas; Holden, Joseph
• 署名单位: Southern University of Science & Technology; University of Leeds; North China University of Water Resources & Electric Power; North China University of Water Resources & Electric Power; Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Domain; ETH Zurich
• 刊物名称: SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0036-9814
• DOI: 10.1126/science.adi9501
• 发表日期: 2024-03-01
• 页码: 1009-1014
• 关键词: water availability; observed trends; part i; impacts; streamflow; indicators; hydrology; patterns; snow

摘要

Riverine ecosystems have adapted to natural discharge variations across seasons. However, evidence suggesting that climate change has already impacted magnitudes of river flow seasonality is limited to local studies, mainly focusing on changes of mean or extreme flows. This study introduces the use of apportionment entropy as a robust measure to assess flow-volume nonuniformity across seasons, enabling a global analysis. We found that similar to 21% of long-term river gauging stations exhibit significant alterations in seasonal flow distributions, but two-thirds of these are unrelated to trends in annual mean discharge. By combining a data-driven runoff reconstruction with state-of-the-art hydrological simulations, we identified a discernible weakening of river flow seasonality in northern high latitudes (above 50 degrees N), a phenomenon directly linked to anthropogenic climate forcing.