Changes in water resources due to climate change and watershed land cover in the West-Transdanubian region of Hungary

The hydrological cycle in Hungary, and consequently in its west Transdanubian region, has undergone significant changes in recent decades due to climate change. The distribution of precipitation throughout the year has changed, and the probability of intense precipitation events has increased, but the annual amount of precipitation has not changed much. Furthermore, droughts have become more severe and prolonged due to rising average annual temperatures and longer rain-free periods. Consequently, evaporation intensity has also increased, which, when combined with the previously mentioned factors, has decreased the quantity of groundwater and surface water resources.

In our previous work, we examined the changes in the specific discharge of several watercourses in the West-Transdanubian region over the past 40 years. We found that the annual specific discharge of all watercourses shows a decreasing trend, despite the fact that the annual precipitation amount does not change significantly. In the case of watercourses originating in the Alps, this decreasing trend is not as steep as in the case of watercourses whose catchment area is entirely located in the Carpathian Basin. In this work, we examined the trends in the change of the watershed land cover and the annual water resource decrease of the watercourses, in order to explore possible connections between the change in watershed land cover and the decrease in specific discharge.

The research was supported by the OTKA grant 143972SNN, the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency grant N2-0313 and the associated project TKP2021-NKTA-43. The project TKP2021-NKTA-43 was implemented with the support of the Ministry of Innovation and Technology through the National Fund for Research Development and Innovation, funded by the TKP2021-NKTA call for proposals.