Winding its way in North China, the Haihe River is 1,329 kilometers long measured from the longest tributary. China's capital (and second largest city), Beijing, and the third largest city, Tianjin, both lie in the Haihe River Basin. The long-term water over-exploitation there has led to cones of groundwater depression, which is still enlarging. Despite of the serious situation of water resource over North China, the effects of anthropogenic water exploitation on land surface processes and climate are still inconclusive.  

Recently, numerical simulation research on climatic effects of groundwater exploitation over Haihe River was conducted by scientists from two institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, ZOU Jing, XIE Zhenghui, QIN Peihua, SUN Qin, and JIA Binghao in LASG/Institute of Atmospheric Physics, and ZHAN Chesheng and XIA Jun in Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resource Research.  

Together, they established a scheme of water exploitation and utilization based on the land surface model CLM3.5 and regional climate model RegCM4. A series of off-line and on-line simulation tests were conducted over Haihe River Basin, in order to investigate the interaction mechanism between groundwater resource exploitation and regional climate, as well as the sensitivity of climate change on water demand.   

The research revealed that the long-term exploitation and utilization of groundwater resource had led to groundwater depressing with local cooling and wetting effects. Only 40%~50% of groundwater volume depressed was transferred into increased precipitation returned to local land surface, and the other water flew outside the basin as water vapor, discharge and etc. Additionally, the water utilization over the basin also caused declined annual mean temperature of 0.15°K, and the temperature even declined by 4°K due to irrigation during the crop growing season like June and July.  

The key research topics of State Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics are research on earth system models, dynamics of weather and climate, atmospheric predictability and geophysical fluid dynamics. The research on effects of human activity and land-atmosphere interaction is one of branches in earth system model research.  

This research finding has been published in Climate Dynamics and Journal of Hydrology.

Citation:
Jing Zou, Zhenghui Xie, Chesheng Zhan, Peihua Qin, Qin Sun, Binghao Jia, Jun Xia. Effects of anthropogenic groundwater exploitation on land surface processes: A case study of the Haihe River Basin, Northern China, 2015. Journal of Hydrology. 524: 625-641.
Jing Zou, Zhenghui Xie, Yan Yu, Chesheng Zhan,Qin Sun. Climatic reponses to anthropogenic groundwater exploitation: a case study of the Haihe River Basin, Northern China, 2014. Climate Dynamics. 42:2125-2145. 

Contact:
XIE Zhenghui
E-mail: zxie@lasg.iap.ac.cn