Attribution of inter-annual and seasonal hydrological alteration to climatic and anthropologic changes at a perennial basin in Southeast China

Change detection and attribution of water cycle are increasingly crucial for promoting society‘s capacity to embed adaptation planning confronting both climate change and anthropogenic forces at catchment scale. Nevertheless, current researches either neglect the difference between internal climate variability and climate change (including internal climate variability and external radiative forcing) or don’t consider different anthropogenic activities (e.g. land use changes, reservoir operation and water consumption). In this study, a new stepwise multiply scenarios approach (SMSA), using model simulations of the Fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) archive and the new generation Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), dubbed SWAT+ model to identify and quantify influence of total five different factors (internal climate variability, external radiative forcing, land use changes, reservoir operation and water consumption) on inter-annual and seasonal hydrological alteration. Application of this approach to a perennial basin in Southeast China highlights the role of reservoir operation.