Water resources and climate change impact modelling on a daily time scale in the Peruvian Andes

Abstract

Estimating water resources is important for adequate water management in the future, but suitable data are often scarce. We estimated water resources in the Vilcanota basin (Peru) for the 1998–2009 period with the semi-distributed hydrological model PREVAH using: (a) raingauge measurements; (b) satellite rainfall estimates from the TRMM Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA); and (c) ERA-Interim re-analysis data. Multiplicative shift and quantile mapping were applied to post-process the TMPA estimates and ERA-Interim data. This resulted in improved low-flow simulations. High-flow simulations could only be improved with quantile mapping. Furthermore, we adopted temperature and rainfall anomalies obtained from three GCMs for three future periods to make estimations of climate change impacts (Delta-change approach) on water resources. Our results show more total runoff during the rainy season from January to March, and temporary storages indicate that less water will be available in this Andean region, which has an effect on water supply, especially during dry season.