Terrestrial Water Cycle And Climate Change: Natural And Human-Induced Impacts

Over the past few decades, the terrestrial water cycle has experienced an unprecedented degree of change. Many of the rivers at the middle latitudes run dry. The river discharge across the Eurasian pan-Arctic has significantly increased and changed in the seasonality. In the managed river basins, regulated stream flow has become the new normal – a shift with potentially profound implications for our water supply. The complex change is driven by the internal variability in the climate system, anthropogenic climate change and widespread human disturbances. Understanding the drivers is the key to predicting future change and is crucial for human adaptation to changing environment.

New hydrological tools have been developed to illustrate the change in the terrestrial water cycle, to understand its drivers, and to address water resource problems associated with the change. Satellite remote sensing has provided fairly long term archive of the constituent variables in the terrestrial water balance such as precipitation, evaporation, soil moisture, snow and ice, and terrestrial water storage variations. Land surface hydrological model with explicit representation of anthropogenic manipulations can simulate more realistically the terrestrial water cycle and attribute its changes. The applications of the emerging hydrological tools have been used to quantify the change, identify the root causes of the change, and predict future change and assess its implications for water management and hazard mitigation. This volume provides a comprehensive overview and a state-of-the-art treatment of technological and scientific advances in our understanding of the change in the terrestrial water cycle and its natural and human-induced drivers. Due to the unprecedented change of the terrestrial water cycle in a changing global environment, it is clear a volume devoted to this subject is worthy and long overdue. New hydrological tools are being developed and performed from local to global scales. It is the right time for such a volume as a reference for students, teachers, engineers, scholars, and research professionals of this field.

The volume focuses on the contemporary terrestrial water cycle change, its natural and human-induced drivers, and the wider implications for water resources from local to global scales. It features a comprehensive examination of the changes in the terrestrial water cycle as well as the root causes of the changes. The multidisciplinary approach covers the topic from both a scientific and technological perspective, integrating such fields as hydrology, remote sensing, water resources, climate change, environmental science and hazard mitigation.

This volume is divided into four sections beginning with (I) two overview chapters where the studies on the change in the terrestrial water cycle are reviewed. Subsequent chapters are grouped into sections (II) dealing with the global picture of the natural and human-induced changes, (III) hydrological tools of the terrestrial water cycle, and (IV) applications at regional scale. In section II, the observational changes in the terrestrial water cycle are illustrated and the impacts from the different drivers are assessed. Section III highlights current tools and methods to quantify the change in the terrestrial water cycle, identify the root causes of the change, and predict future change. The volume concludes with the applications at regional scale. In its entirety, we hope this volume illustrates a whole picture of the change in the terrestrial water cycle, portrays the current directions and future needs in the study of the change, and demonstrates practical and achievable ways to understand local and regional scale change in a changing global environment.

Qiuhong Tang is a Professor in the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China. His research focuses on Land surface hydrology, Global change, Remote sensing hydrology, Water resources. He has published extensively in many geological journals including the prestigious Nature Climate Change, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA and AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters. He is a professional member of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), American Meteorological Society (AMS) and Geographical Society of China (GSC).