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Most studies on separating the effects of climate change and human activities on runoff are mainly conducted at an annual scale with few analyses over different time scales, which is especially essential for regional water resources management. This paper investigates the impacts of climate change and human activities on runoff changes at annual, seasonal and monthly time scales in the Zhang River basin in North China. Firstly, the changing trends and inflection point are analyzed for hydro-climatic series over different time scales. Then the hydrological modeling based method and sensitivity based method are used to separate the effects. The results show that the effect of climate change is stronger than that of human activities on annual runoff changes. However, the driving factors on runoff are different at seasonal scale. In the wet season, the effect of human activities on runoff, accounting for 57 %, is stronger than that of climate change, while in the dry season climate change is the dominant factor for runoff reduction and the contribution rate is 72 %. Furthermore, the effects of climate change and human activities on monthly runoff changes are various in different months. The separated effects over different time scales in this study may provide more scientific basis for the water resources adaptive management over different time scales in this basin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of global and regional climate change and heightened human activities, runoff from some rivers in the world, especially in the arid and semi-arid regions, has significantly decreased. To reveal the varying characteristics leading to the change in runoff, detecting the influencing factors has been important in recent scientific discussions for water resources management in drainage basins. In this paper, an investigation into attributing the runoff response to climate change and human activities were conducted in two catchments (Wushan and Shetang), situated in the upper reaches of Weihe River in China. Prior to the identification of the factors that influenced runoff changes, the Mann-Kendall test was adopted to identify the trends in hydro-climate series. Also, change-points in the annual runoff were detected through Pettitt's test and the precipitation-runoff double cumulative curve method. It is found that both catchments presented significant negative trend in annual runoff and the detected change-point in runoff occurs in 1993. Hence, the pre-change period and post-change period are defined before and after 1993, respectively. Then, runoff response to climate change and human activities was quantitatively evaluated on the basis of hydrologic sensitivity analysis and hydrologic model simulation. They provided similar estimates of the percentage change in mean annual runoff for the post-change period over the considered catchments. It is found that the decline in annual runoff over both catchments can be mainly attributed to the human activities, the reduction percentages due to human activities range from 59 to 77 %. The results of this study can provide a reference for the development, utilization and management of the regional water resources and ecological environment protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]