Impacts of Climate Change on Runoff from Snowmelt (Case Study: Shahrchay basin Urmia)

According to the importance of snowfall in supplying water of different regions especially mountainous areas, accurate estimation of snow water equvallent and changes of its coverage would be effective in agriculture, energy, management of reservoir and flood warnings. In this study runoff orginated from snow melting in ShahrChay basin under the terms of climate change calculated. For this purpose, snow cover for water year of 2012-2013 were extracted in ENVI software by using daily images of Modis satellite.Then, GIS software the physiographic specification of the basin was obtained. In the next step, data of snow cover, meteorological variables and other necessary parameters to SRM model provided as an input of model and run_off from snow melt was simulated. Then output of the 6 models of atmospheric general circulation with title of 3 scenarios nomely A1B , A2 and B1 converted to a downscaleing by using LARS-WG model. By comparing the output of 6 models in the future period to period based on monthly statistical, the best model and scenario for generation of air temperature and precipitation data in the period 2030-2011 were selected. As a result the HADCM3 model under the scenario A1B was used for generation of precipitation and the MPEH5 under scenarios A2 was used for generation of temperature data. In order to estimate the rate of change of runoff orginated from snowmelt rate of change of monthly data of air temperature and precipitation of the base time period as well as future time period under selected model and scenarios was entered to SRM model in simulation time period. Results for all of the scenarios show that runoff orginated from snowmelt in late spring will be reduced. The peak flow appeared earlier in comparison with base time period and its value would be larger than base time period.