Using paired catchments to quantify the human influence  on hydrological droughts

Van Loon, Anne F.; Rangecroft, Sally; Coxon, Gemma; Breña Naranjo, José Agustín; Van Ogtrop, Floris; Van Lanen, Henny A. J.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-1725-2019

Articles | Volume 23, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-1725-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-1725-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 23, issue 3

Research article

|

26 Mar 2019

Research article |

| 26 Mar 2019

Using paired catchments to quantify the human influence on hydrological droughts

Anne F. Van Loon, Sally Rangecroft, Gemma Coxon, José Agustín Breña Naranjo, Floris Van Ogtrop, and Henny A. J. Van Lanen

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Final revised paper (published on 26 Mar 2019)
Preprint (discussion started on 25 Apr 2018)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

SC1: 'Using paired catchments to quantify the human influence on hydrological droughts', Sivarajah Mylevaganam, 18 May 2018
- AC2: 'Authors response to SC1', Sally Rangecroft, 21 Jun 2018
RC1: 'Review: Land- and water-use characteristics in the basins', Anonymous Referee #1, 21 May 2018
- AC1: 'Authors response to Reviewer 1's comments', Sally Rangecroft, 21 Jun 2018
RC2: 'Review of Rangecroft et al. 2018 fort HESS.', Jamie Hannaford, 05 Jul 2018
- AC3: 'Authors response to Reviewer 2's comments', Sally Rangecroft, 13 Aug 2018

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (28 Aug 2018) by Markus Hrachowitz

AR by Anne Van Loon on behalf of the Authors (01 Nov 2018) Author's response

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (09 Nov 2018) by Markus Hrachowitz

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (02 Dec 2018)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I thank the authors for addressing most of my comments and I see that the manuscript has been greatly improved by changing some basins and giving more information on the basins. The methodology is now simple to replicate and straightforward. Two remaining comments:

1. I agree that finding completely natural catchments without human influence and hydroclimatic data availability is difficult. That is why, using a large number of catchments instead of a single pair-to-pair analysis can also yield interesting general patterns pointing to a specific human driver or several (something like "paired groups of catchments" approach). I think this is the approach Nr. 4 mentioned by the authors. However, I think that studies using this approach at a larger scale and that have also studied drought/aridity from the perspective of evapotranspiration (via de Budyko framework) could also be included to complete the literature review.

See for example:
*Destouni, G., Jaramillo, F., & Prieto, C. (2013). Hydroclimatic shifts driven by human water use for food and energy production. Nature Climate Change, 3(3), 213–217. https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1719

or

*Jaramillo, F., & Destouni, G. (2015). Local flow regulation and irrigation raise global human water consumption and footprint. Science, 350(6265), 1248–1251. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad1010

2. "water use" is an important aspect that definitely cannot be ignored when using a pair catchment approach (Page 10 line 9). And again, I would definitely recommend a comparison on the amount of regulation in both basin or groups of basins used, in terms of for instance, number of embankments, check dams, dams, etc), or any data available on the subject, just to be sure that the benchmark catchment is not heavily regulated. If no data is available, this can still be even done from Google Earth or so. I say this precisely because of the findings of the studies mentioned in my point 1.

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RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (15 Jan 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The idea behind this paper is sound, however I feel as though this paper is presenting an argument that will bring us full circle on the debate of what methods are appropriate for understanding the incremental impact that humans have on the hydrological extremes. We have many of the modelling methods (that are time consuming and full of uncertainty) because of the issues with the paired catchment approach, and their associated uncertainties. This is especially true when we try to interpret our impact on the extremes. See the debates that arose from the issues that Alila and others brought forward around the possible forestry impacts on flooding. The previous reviews highlighted several issues with the original submission, but perhaps focused on the issue of matching the catchments. That is only one source of uncertainty when using the paired-catchment approach. As the authors point out this method has been around for about a century, and unfortunately, the debates about how to interpret data and how transferable the results are is still ongoing. These debates are over data measured in the most controlled environments (very small neighbouring watersheds) with a full BACI design.
I agree with the authors in that we should not let go of the fundamentals of using observations, but the paper does not convenience me that these methods are going to provide new insights. I’m not sure the way forward on this issue, however as it relates to the current paper I might suggest that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the methodology, it just has lots of uncertainty - which the authors point out. This makes it very hard to have a paper with the objective to propose and justify the use of this method. Making the focus of the paper on results might be an option. Rather than using case studies to highlight this as an acceptable method, perhaps the paired catchment methods can be applied to a region that has existing studies on droughts to provide an additional body of evidence towards (or against) what other studies have presented on the possible human impacts on drought?

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ED: Publish subject to revisions (further review by editor and referees) (16 Jan 2019) by Markus Hrachowitz

AR by Anne Van Loon on behalf of the Authors (11 Mar 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (12 Mar 2019) by Markus Hrachowitz

AR by Anne Van Loon on behalf of the Authors (12 Mar 2019)

Short summary

We explore the use of the classic paired-catchment approach to quantify human influence on hydrological droughts. In this approach two similar catchments are compared and differences are attributed to the human activity present in one. In two case studies in UK and Australia, we found that groundwater abstraction aggravated streamflow drought by > 200 % and water transfer alleviated droughts with 25–80 %. Understanding the human influence on droughts can support water management decisions.