水灾害防御全国重点实验室 - 新闻动态

The human interferences to hydrologic processes include direct interferencessuch as water storage and diversions, groundwater pumping and return flows,and indirect interferences such as those altering vegetation and land cover, soils, topography and climate.The interferences are both extensive and intensive and have transformed hydrologic processes at spatial scales ranging from local to global. The transformation has resulted in the violation of some conventional hydrologic principles, which assume human effects are fully assimilated by natural processes. In numerical modeling exercises, ignoring human interferences and the uncertainty involved can result in biased errors in numerical models designed for water resources management. This presentation will illustrate some of the footprints of human interferences in hydrologic processes (e.g., patterns changes in aquifer storage, flow recession, and evapotranspiration) and demonstrate the role of human activities as an unignorable component of hydrological systems. The reciprocal interactions and feedbacks between human activities and natural processes over space and timemake it necessary to conceptualize and model watersheds and other water resources systems as coupled human-natural systems (CHNS), especially matching distributed natural processes with distributed decision making and consequences. A key issue is to understand how the dynamics of land and water management practices (resulting from human behaviors) co-evolve with the partitionpattern of water and energy and the corridors of mass and energy flow at the various spatial and temporal scales.In academics, empirical and theoretical methods in hydrology need to be updated with consideration of the human component. While in practice, given the growing issues in complex systems characterized by the water-energy-food-environment nexus (i.e., the system of systems), interdisciplinary efforts should be enhanced to address growing human interferences, as well as changing climate.