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The impact of climate, CO 2 , nitrogen deposition and land use change on simulated contemporary global river flow
Author(s) -
Shi Xiaoying,
Mao Jiafu,
Thornton Peter E.,
Hoffman Forrest M.,
Post Wilfred M.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2011gl046773
Subject(s) - climate change , deposition (geology) , environmental science , nitrogen , flow (mathematics) , land use, land use change and forestry , land use , global change , hydrology (agriculture) , atmospheric sciences , climatology , geology , oceanography , geomorphology , ecology , chemistry , geotechnical engineering , biology , geometry , mathematics , organic chemistry , sediment
We investigated how climate, rising atmospheric CO 2 concentration, increasing anthropogenic nitrogen deposition and land use change influenced continental river flow over the period 1948–2004 using the Community Land Model version 4 (CLM4) with coupled river transfer model (RTM), a global river routing scheme. The model results indicate that the global mean river flow shows significant decreasing trend and climate forcing likely functions as the dominant controller of the downward trend during the study period. Nitrogen deposition and land use change account for about 5% and 2.5% of the decrease in simulated global scale river flow, respectively, while atmospheric CO 2 accounts for an upward trend. However, the relative role of each driving factor is heterogeneous across regions in our simulations. The trend in river flow for the Amazon River basin is primarily explained by CO 2 , while land use change accounts for 27.4% of the downward trend in river flow for the Yangtze rive basin. Our simulations suggest that to better understand the trends of river flow, it is not only necessary to take into account the climate, but also to consider atmospheric composition, carbon‐nitrogen interaction and land use change, particularly for regional scales.