Impacts of climate and land-use change on water resources in a watershed:A case study on the Trent River basin in North Carolina,USA

The distributed precipitation-runoff modeling system (PRMS)will support the study on the impacts of climate change and land-use change on water resources in a watershed.Modeling results show that the PRMS model performs satisfactorily for simulating water yield,as indicated by an overall Nash-Sutcliffe simulation efficiency over 0.8. The reduced scales of HRU (Hydrological Response Units)delineation show a better model-fit efficiency to some extend about 7%.The 71 HRUs delineation can result in the best overall performance of the modeling system.The order of land-use and climate change sensitivity to evapotranspiration and water yield is given as follows:precipitation > urban land-use > temperature > crop and grasses.The water yield has greatly larger changes than the evapotranspiration under land-use and climate changes.It is predicted that the annual evapotranspiration will increase 5.64-201.29 mm,and the water yield will increase about 160 mm or decrease about 180 mm under the scenarios of land-use change corresponding with the climate change.