Advances in Earth Science ›› 2017, Vol. 32 ›› Issue (10): 1020-1029. doi: 10.11867/j.issn.1001-8166.2017.10.1020

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Progresses in Soil Freezing-Thawing Effects on the Runoff Generation in Plateau-Mountain Regions

Genwei Cheng( ), Jihui Fan, Li Peng   

  1. Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chengdu 610041,China
  • Received:2017-03-22 Revised:2017-08-12 Online:2017-12-20 Published:2017-12-20
  • About author:

    First author:Cheng Genwei (1956-), male,Chengdu City, Sichuan Province, Professor. Research areas include hydrology and eco-environment.E-mail:gwcheng@imde.ac.cn

  • Supported by:
    Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China “The soil freezing-thawing impacts to runoff generation in southwestern alpine-plateau and their dynamic simulations”(No.41671016).

Genwei Cheng, Jihui Fan, Li Peng. Progresses in Soil Freezing-Thawing Effects on the Runoff Generation in Plateau-Mountain Regions[J]. Advances in Earth Science, 2017, 32(10): 1020-1029.

The water feeding of main rivers in Asia is under influence by cold environment in alpine regions. The snow coverage and soil freeze affect surface condition of runoff generation of river heads. The mechanism of water-ice phase transition plays an important role to the river water supplying in cold regions. It greatly affects the water resource for large rivers in Asia, especially in the impact of global climate change. The soil freezing and thawing effects are the controlling factors of runoff change of mountainous rivers. The prediction of stream flow is of large uncertainty under the influence of climate change, which is the hotspot in the study on the global change impacting water resource. To explore the runoff change rule of river heads in Asia and predicate the water resource dynamics, one needs to know the alpine environment affecting freeze pattern of soil water, determine transformation condition and threshold of soil ice-water in mountain regions, design runoff generation models and parameters in alpine region, propose relative theories on the soil freezing-thawing and runoff generation. For these purposes, jointed stadies are necessary for the mountain field hydrological observation, simulation experiments of soil freezing and thawing in laboratory, and mode study of phase transition of soil water based on the thermodynamics. These studies will solve the key problems in micro-mechanism of cold hydrology, scale effect and predication techniques. It will help to develop multi-scale distributed hydrological models, and enhance the forecasting level for the river hydrographs in mountain regions.

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