Future Irrigation Demand of South Saskatchewan River Basin under the Combined Impacts of Climate Change and El Niño Southern Oscillation

Zahidul Islam () and Thian Gan

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), 2015, vol. 29, issue 6, 2105 pages

Abstract: We assessed the future irrigation demand of the South Saskatchewan River Basin (SSRB) of Alberta subjected to combined impact of climate change and El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) using the Irrigation District Model (IDM) of Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development. Based on the agro-climatic data of SSRB of 1928–1995, the potential impact of climate change on SSRB’s irrigation water demand for three future periods, i.e., 2010–2039 (2020s), 2040–2069 (2050s), 2070–2099 (2080s) are simulated by IDM on the basis of Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) climate scenarios projected by four General Circulation Models (GCMs) of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The combined impact on SSRB’s irrigation water demand is also simulated on the basis of SRES climate scenarios together with an active El Niño or La Niña in the 2050s. If only the potential impact of climate change is considered, IDM’s simulations for 2020s, 2050s, and 2080s show a general increasing trend in the irrigation demand in the 21st century for both the irrigation districts and the private irrigation blocks. On the average, water demands for the irrigation districts and private irrigation blocks are expected to increase by 7% and 11% in the 2020s, 12% and 17% in the 2050s, and 13% and 18% in the 2080s, respectively. While considering the combined impact for the 2050s, a further 7% decrease (1% increase) in the irrigation demand is projected under an active El Niño (La Niña) episode. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Keywords: Climate change; ENSO; Irrigation water demand; IDM; SSRB (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11269-015-0930-1 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:waterr:v:29:y:2015:i:6:p:2091-2105

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11269

DOI: 10.1007/s11269-015-0930-1

Access Statistics for this article

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) is currently edited by G. Tsakiris

More articles in Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) from Springer, European Water Resources Association (EWRA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().