Surface Water Resources, Climate Change and Simulation Modeling

In the wake of changing climate the present water crisis seems to tighten its hold on the Mankind hence water resources estimation is integral part of planning, development and management of water resources of the country and the estimation of water resource is based on several hydrological and meteorological parameters. Rainfall is the main source of the ground and surface water resources. Recently due to anticipated climate change it is projected that spatial and temporal pattern of rainfall in different part of the country will be change and there will be increase in intensity of rainfall greater monsoon variability. This unprecedented change is expected to have severe impact on the on the water resource and finally on water resource estimation for future planning and management. Apart from climate change, both the ever increasing population and the rapidly changing land use patterns have left the major river basins of the India in a bleak uncertainty to keep up the required runoff. For planning and management, the climate and the hydrological modellers have begun working out runoff projections. During recent years, the Global Climate Models (GCMs) and Regional Climate Models (RCMs) driven hydrological models are in frequent use to draw such projections. But the projections have been often found to lack of reliability. Very recently, there is another emerging field of multi-model ensembles that has added feather to cap of the climate modeling community but this field is yet to be tried in many of the basin runoff-studies especially in the Indian perspective. There is a dire need for more research input assessing the future runoff as far as the Indian River basins are concerned. The climate models are being improved day by day so are the hydrological models. The multi-model ensembles are expected to bring out more reliability in the model outputs regarding the future runoff regimes of the basins than that could be brought about using individual models. The present study is a brief review of the model-based projections made for the some of the major river basins of the world. This attempt also seeks to bring forth the basin wise state-of-the-art research activities of such a kind so that the unexplored horizons of model based hydrological research could be taken up as newer research challenges like eg. in India there hasn't yet been much basin scale studies conducted using multi-model ensembles. Therefore it is suggested that detailed studies to be taken up to assess the impact of climate change on the various parameters involved in estimation of water resources and asses water resource keeping in view the climate change for more realistic future planning and integrated water resource management. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.