Analysis of climate change impact on flow duration characteristics in the Mekong River

The purpose of this study is to analyze the Mekong River streamflow alteration due to climate change. The future climate change scenarios were produced by bias corrections of the data from East Asia RCP 4.5 and 8.5 scenarios, given by HadGEM3-RA. Then, SWAT model was used for discharge simulation of the Kratie, the main point of the Mekong River (watershed area: 646,000 km², 88% of the annual average flow rate of the Mekong River). As a result of the climate change analysis, the annual precipitation of the Kratie upper-watershed increase in both scenarios compared to the baseline yearly average precipitation. The monthly precipitation increase is relatively large from June to November. In particular, precipitation fluctuated greatly in the RCP 8.5 rather than RCP 4.5. Monthly average maximum and minimum temperature are predicted to be increased in both scenarios. As well as precipitation, the temperature increase in RCP 8.5 scenarios was found to be more significant than RCP 4.5. In addition, as a result of the duration curve comparison, the streamflow variation will become larger in low and high flow rate and the drought will be further intensified in the future.