ASSESSMENT OF DROUGHT RESILIENCE IN A CLIMATE CHANGE SCENARIO: A HYDROLOGICAL MODELING APPLIED TO THE PIANCÓ-PIRANHAS-AÇU RIVER BASIN
drought; climate change; hydrological modeling; management of water resources.
Droughts reduce water availability and threaten life, economic development and the maintenance of ecosystems. This phenomenon is expected to worsen in the Brazilian semi-arid region with climate change, which alters the global water cycle and has the potential to modify the water availability of the watershed. In this situation, there will be an imbalance between the supply and demand of water on a regional and local scale, increasing the vulnerability of water resources systems to droughts and reducing their resilience to these. Understanding these effects is crucial for assessing future water availability and for developing sustainable management plans, especially for key semi-arid watersheds such as the Piancó-Piranhas-Açu River basin. The objective of the study will be to evaluate the capacity of the Piancó-Piranhas-Açu River basin to cope with droughts in the future climate, based on the hydrological modeling of hydrological flows in the basin and its main supply reservoirs. To represent the possible climate change scenarios, regionalized climate projections from the Global Circulation Models (GCM) of Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) for two different greenhouse gas emission scenarios (RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5) will be used. These data will be used to force the SWAT hydrological model to generate future scenarios of regulated flow downstream of the main reservoirs in the basin. Drought hydrometeorological events will be identified and characterized in the future climate based on typically used indices (SPEI, SSI), where water scarcity and vulnerability indicators will also be used to carry out quantitative analyzes of the basin's water supply probability in drought events. Thus, the research aims to provide an overview of the water patterns of the Piancó-Piranhas-Açu River basin on the periods of extreme scarcity events with climate change.