Coupling a glacier melt model to the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) model for hydrological modeling in north-western China

For the sustainable utilization of rivers in the mid and downstream regions, it is essential that land surface hydrological processes are quantified in high cold mountains regions, as it is in these regions where most of the larger rivers in China acquire their headstreams. Glaciers are one of the most important water resources of north-west China. However, they are seldom explicitly considered within hydrological models, and climate-change effects on glaciers, permafrost and snow cover will have increasingly important consequences for runoff. In this study, an energy-balance ice-melt model was integrated within the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) macroscale hydrological model. The extended VIC model was applied to simulate the hydrological processes in the Aksu River basin, a large mountainous and glaciered catchment in north-west China. The runoff components and their response to climate change were analyzed based on the simulated and observed data. The model showed an acceptable performance, and achieved an efficiency coefficient R ² ≈ 0.8 for the complete simulation period. The results indicate that a large proportion of the catchment runoff is derived from ice meltwater and snowmelt water. In addition, over the last 38 years, rising temperature caused an extension in the snow/ice melting period and a reduction in the seasonality signal of runoff. Due to teh increased precipitation runoff, the Aksu catchment annual runoff had a positive trend, increasing by about 40.00 × 10⁶ m³ per year, or 25.7 %.