The Langtang catchment is a high mountain, third order catchment in the Gandaki basin in the Central Himalaya (28.2°N, 85.5°E), that eventually drains into the Ganges.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Upper Indus Basin's (UIB) unique geographical positioning and its ecosystem contributions to the downstream basin in the form of water and energy are of critical importance. UIB is also among the most vulnerable water towers in the world vis-a-vis climate as well as a host of environmental and socio-economic changes. The paucity of ground observations and their associated unknowns make it imperative to study and highlight the grey areas for attention and action by policy planners and basin government and management at different levels in order to improve the management and the governance structures for better water resource management.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSiloed-approaches may fuel the misguided development of hydropower and subsequent target-setting under the sustainable development goals (SDGs). While hydropower development in the Indus basin is vital to ensure energy security (SDG7), it needs to be balanced with water use for fulfilling food (SDG2) and water (SDG6) security. Existing methods to estimate hydropower potential generally focus on: only one class of potential, a methodological advance for either of hydropower siting, sizing, or costing of one site, or the ranking of a portfolio of projects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Hindu Kush-Himalayan region is an important global freshwater resource. The hydrological regime of the region is vulnerable to climatic variations, especially precipitation and temperature. In our study, we modelled the impact of climate change on the water balance and hydrological regime of the snow dominated Kaligandaki Basin.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFuture hydrological extremes, such as floods and droughts, may pose serious threats for the livelihoods in the upstream domains of the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra. For this reason, the impacts of climate change on future hydrological extremes is investigated in these river basins. We use a fully-distributed cryospheric-hydrological model to simulate current and future hydrological fluxes and force the model with an ensemble of 8 downscaled General Circulation Models (GCMs) that are selected from the RCP4.
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