Liu, Q; Mcvicar, TimR; Yang, Z; Donohue, RJ; Liang, L; Yang, Y
Vegetation patterns are affected by water availability, which, in turn, influences the hydrological partitioning and regional water balance, especially in water-limited regions. Considering the important role of vegetation in partitioning the catchment water yield, the recently developed Budyko-Choudhury-Porporato (or BCP) model incorporated Porporato's model of key ecohydrological processes into Choudury's form of the Budyko hydroclimatic framework. Here we extend the steady state BCP model by incorporating dynamic ecohydrological processes into it and combining it with a typical bucket soil water balance model (resulting in the dynamic BCP, or dBCP, model). The dBCP model is used here to assess the impacts of vegetation on the water balance in a temperate water-limited basin (i.e., the Yellow River Basin (YRB) in north China), where growing season phenology is primarily constrained by low temperatures. The results show that: (i) the incorporation of dynamic growing season (f(s)) and dynamic effective rooting depth (Z(e)) conditions into the dBCP model improves results when compared to the original BCP model; (ii) dBCP model's results vary depending on time-step used (i.e., we tested mean-annual to monthly), which reflected the influence of catchment variables, e.g., catchment area, catchment-average air temperature, dryness index and Z(e); and (iii) actual evapotranspiration (E) is more, sensitive to changes in mean storm depth (alpha), followed by P, Z(e), and E-p. When taking into account observed variability of each of four ecohydrological variables, changes in Z(e) cause the greatest variability in E, generally followed by variability in P and alpha, and then E-p. The dBCP results indicate that incorporating dynamic ecohydrological processes into the Budyko framework can improve the estimation of inter annual variability of the regional water balance. This can help to understand the water requirement and to establish suitable water management strategies to adapt to climate change in the YRB. The dBCP model has modest forcing data requirements and can be applied to other basins globally. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
