Sir,
I need to understand the impact of climate change on water related ecosystem services. To quantify this I have selected InVEST as a model. I have a doubt whether Climate Change scenarios are incorporated in InVEST model. If yes, how it is incorporated and if no, then how can we incorporate these scenarios in the water yield model to understand the climate change induced impacts.
Hello @sribalaji -
Climate change scenarios may be used to create the climate-related inputs to the model. For the Seasonal Water Yield or Annual Water Yield model, you’d use the climate change layers for precipitation as the precipitation inputs, and the evapotranspiration inputs can be created with a combination of climate change layers for precipitation and temperature (depending on which method you’re using to calculate ET). For SDR, we use climate change data to create the rainfall erosivity input.
One thing to keep in mind is that most of our freshwater models run on an annual average timestep (except Seasonal Water Yield, which is monthly) so if your climate change scenarios are showing differences in the timing of rain or storm intensity, these won’t be illustrated well by the models. This can be a particular issue in places with, for example, monsoon seasons that might change. If you use the Seasonal Water Yield model, you can focus on the monsoon months to look at runoff, but again individual events won’t be well captured there, they’ll be smoothed out over the month. The Annual Water Yield model even more so.
~ Stacie
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