Study of the Climate Change Impacts on Water Quality in the Upstream Portion of the Cau River Basin,Vietnam

This paper presents simulations of climate change impacts on water quality in the upstream portion of the Cau River Basin in the North of Vietnam. The integrated modeling system GIBSI was used to simulate hydrological processes, pollutant and sediment wash-off in the river basin, and pollutant transport and transformation in the river network. Three projections for climate change based on emission scenarios B1, B2, and A2 of IPCC Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES) were considered. By assuming that the input pollution sources and watershed configuration were constant, based on 2008 data, water quality in the river network was simulated up to the terminal year 2050. For each climate change scenario, patterns of precipitation in wet and dry year were considered. The change in annual and monthly trends for dissolved oxygen (DO), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), and ammonium ions (NH4+) load and concentration for different portions of the watershed have been analyzed. The results of these simulations show that climate change has more impact on changing the seasonal water quality parameters than on altering the average annual load of the pollutants. The percent change and change pattern in water quality parameters are different for wet and dry year, and the changes in wet year are smaller than those in dry year.