hide
Free keywords:
-
Abstract:
The Central Highlands of Vietnam, located in an area susceptible to extreme weather conditions brought on by El Niño, has endured severe droughts during the dry seasons, leading to significant environmental and socio-economic consequences in recent decades. This study, conducted as part of the Drought-ADAPT project (https://www.bmbf-client.de/en/projects/drought-adapt), aims to assess the regional water resources with a focus on both surface water and groundwater for the present period and future projection scenarios.
Therefore, the grid-based mesoscale Hydrological Model was implemented for the region encompassing two major river basins Sesan and Seprok, tributaries of the Mekong. The model, mHM-2S, that was driven by daily weather data from either ERA5 reanalysis dataset or the regional climate model REMO, considered various dominant hydrological processes and the impact of multiple large hydroelectric reservoirs in the area. The calibration of mHM-2S was performed with a multi-objective approach, fitting not only observed stream flow at several gauges but also aligning groundwater storage information derived from the GRACE/G3P gravity-based groundwater product. The refined mHM-2S was then used to estimate the regional water resources in terms of means and variations of seasonal discharge, total and groundwater storages under future climate forcings, land-use changes as well as various reservoir operational plans.