The effect of climate change on surface runoff fluctuations in the Aras River basin

The aim of this study was to predict changes in temperature, precipitation and evaluate the effects of climate change on the status of surface runoff in the Aras catchment. Climatic conditions were simulated in LARS-WG software environment under RCP8.5 scenario. Using the modified Trent White experimental model, the amount of potential evapotranspiration was estimated for both observation and simulation periods. To ensure the validity of the model, the mean error orthography (RMSE), and the determination coefficient and Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient (ENS) were used. Also, modeling of surface runoff changes in GIS software environment and SWAT plugin was performed. After forming hydrological units (HRU), the baseline model for surface runoff changes was selected to calibrate and validate the model. The results show that by modeling climatic data during the simulation period, the amount of temperature, evapotranspiration and transpiration will increase, and in contrast, the amount of precipitation has occurred and the flow rate will decrease superficially. The results of validation showed that the accuracy of the model in the selected stations was high and for the precipitation parameter due to its discontinuous nature, the correlation between the data is less than the temperature parameter and different. The results of hydrometric modeling of the basins showed that the Nash-Sutcliffe value is close to 1 and the correlation coefficient between the data is 0.99, which indicates the high efficiency of the model for simulating and estimating climate change and its effects on surface runoff.