Avaliação dos efeitos de alterações na precipitação devido a mudanças climáticas no regime hidrológico da bacia do rio Paraguaçu, BA

Abstract

Climate changes can increase conflicts over water in several regions of the planet. Long term predictions indicate that many semi-arid areas, including the northeast of Brazil, will suffer a decrease of water resources. In this context, this study aimed to evaluate the effects of changes in precipitation due to climate changes on the hydrological response of the Paraguaçu river basin, as well as evaluating the applicability of climate models and hydrological modeling in the studied area. Projections of precipitation anomalies were generated through a assembly of climate models, where synthetic precipitation series were used as an input in the hydrological model SWAT. The results were analyzed by comparing scenarios. The hydrological model showed satisfactory performance in representing the flow rates of the studied region, reflecting the greater difficulty in representing river flow variability considering a daily scale. For all scenarios evaluated, there was a trend of reduction of the rainfall and flow rates in the short and long term scale. However, it is important to note that the projections obtained from global climate models have many uncertainties, especially for long-term simulations.