PUB Working Group 6-5 (WG6-5): Study on ecologically vulnerable basins in China
Objectives:
Most of catchments in China, especially in northern China are now suffering disrupted ecological changes, such as river flow -drying out in the Yellow River and Haihe River, the serious water pollution, flood disaster and among others. The initial and the most important task of the prediction problems in ungauged basins in China is to sort out how to assess the water resource in the changed environment, how to calculate ecological water demand which has been ignored for many years in water resources management and how to raise the accuracy of hydrological forecasting. As both the gauged and ungauged basins in China all have been heavily disturbed by human activities.
We gather participants from different research backgrounds on the common variables of interest in the same specific catchments, which is then able to make an inter-comparison of the approaches. The best method which needs less data and still provides high accuracy will be chosen. The first results from this working group provides ne w insights for the prediction in basins suffering ecological disruptions, which is the base to extend the methods to the ungauged basins which are now also suffering these changes. Importantly, the different approaches have very different information requirements � this enables the identification of a hierarchy of preferred methodologies given practical requirements for prediction in data-sparse or ungauged basins. Additionally, this process can be seen in reverse - this permits the identification of data required, given the accuracy required of the analysis.
Building on these results, the integration of the activities may be evaluated � when the different approaches are integrated into a common framework, are the methodologies mutually beneficial? In other words, can uncertainty be reduced through any synergies achieved after integrating these diverse approaches?
Finally, the comparability within working groups enables similar comparability between working group. New insights associated with the performance of different methodologies in different environments are therefore enabled representing significant value -adding to the PUB exercise.
Study Areas
Key Participants: