| The Schuylkill River watershed located in southeastern Pennsylvania caters to various services including supplying drinking water to the cities, providing water for power generation, recreation, transportation, irrigation, and supporting ecosystems. Changing climate and land use patterns are likely to impact the water resources by influencing precipitation, evapotranspiration, soil moisture, and infiltration rates at a local scale. This study attempts to build a hydrologic model to assess the impact of climate and land use change on water resources in the region. The hydrologic model was created within the STELLA modeling environment. The STELLA model was calibrated for three years, from 2007 to 2010, by comparing daily recorded stream flow with the model prediction for stream flow. Downscaled future climate change scenarios were gathered from the Localized Constructed Analogs (LOCA) from 2020 to 2040 for the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) 4.5 and RCP 8.5 emission scenarios. Three regional land use change scenarios were developed based on historical land use and land cover change trends. The calibrated STELLA model was then run under projected climate and land use scenarios to analyze the effect of those changes on water resources. Results of these simulations indicate that daily streamflow objectives are met 67.68% -76.85% of the time for the time period between 2040-2040 under the RCP 4.5 emission scenarios, and 67.17% - 75.55% of the days under the RCP 8.5 emission scenarios in the Schuylkill River watershed. The impact of land use and land cover change on water resources was found to be insignificant for this region. |
