demand and supply of water for agriculture influence of topography and climate in pre-alpine, mesoscale catchments农业用水需求和供给的影响前-阿尔卑斯的地形和气候,中尺度集雨.pdfVIP

Natural Resources, 2012, 3, 145-155 145 /10.4236/nr.2012.33019 Published Online September 2012 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/nr) Demand and Supply of Water for Agriculture: Influence of Topography and Climate in Pre-Alpine, Mesoscale Catchments 1 1,2 Jürg Fuhrer , Karsten Jasper 1Air Pollution/Climate Group, Agroscope Research Station Art, Zurich, Switzerland; 2Hydrology Department, Federal Office of the Environment, Bern, Switzerland. Email: juerg.fuhrer@art.admin.ch Received June 6th, 2012; revised July 19th, 2012; accepted July 28th, 2012 ABSTRACT With climate change, water may become limited for intensive agriculture even in regions presently considered “wa- ter-rich”. Information about the potential water requirement and its temporal and spatial variability can help to develop future water management plans. A case study was carried out for Switzerland with its highly complex pre-alpine topog- raphy and steep gradients in climate. The hydrological model WaSiM-ETH was used to simulate net irrigation require- ment (NIR) for cropland, grassland and orchards using criteria to define irrigation periods based either on the water stress level (expressed by the ratio of actual (aET) to potential evapotranspiration (pET ) (Method 1) or on thresholds for soil water potential (Method 2). Simulations for selected catchments were carried out with a daily time step for the pe- riod 1981-2010 using a 500 × 500 m spatial resolution. Catchment-scale NIR ranged between 0 and 4.3 million m3 and 0 and 7.3 million m3 for the two methods, respectively, with no trend over the observation period in any catchment. During the heat wave in 2003, NIR increased by a factor of 1.5 to 2.3 relative to the mean, and in catchments where discharge is directly dependent on precipitation, NIR in the summer of