Evaluating the impact of climate change on groundwater resources in a small Mediterranean watershed

Western Mediterranean Region of Turkey is subject to considerable impacts of climate change that may adversely affect the water resources. Decrease in annual precipitation and winter precipitation as well as increase in temperatures are observed since 1960s. In this study, the impact of climate change on groundwater resources in part of Köyceğiz-Dalyan Watershed was evaluated. Evaluation was done by quantifying the impacts of climate change on the water budget components. Hydrological modeling was conducted with SWAT model which was calibrated and validated successfully. Climate change and land use scenarios were used to calculate the present and future climate change impacts on water budgets. According to the simulation results, almost all water budget components have decreased. SWAT was able to allocate less irrigation water because of the decrease of overall water due to the climate change. This resulted in an increase of water stressed days and temperature stressed days whereas crop yields have decreased according to the simulation results. The results indicated that lack of water is expected to be a problem in the future. In this manner, investigations on switching to more efficient irrigation methods and to crops with less water consumption are recommended as adaptation measures to climate change impacts.