Previous studies that quantified variations in runoff have mainly focused on the combined impacts of climate and human activities or climate and land cover change. Few have separated land cover change from human activities, which is critical for effective management of water resources. This study aims to investigate the impact of changing environmental conditions on runoff using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model; we examined three categories: climate, land cover change and direct human activities. The study area was the Wei River Basin, a typical arid to semi-arid basin that was divided into five sub-zones (UZ, MZ, DZ, JZ and BZ). Our results showed the following: (1) the calibrated SWAT model produced satisfactory monthly flow processes over the baseline period from 1978 to 1986; (2) compared to the baseline period, the impact of climatic variations decreased and the impact of direct human activities increased from the 1990s to the 2000s, while the impact of land cover change was generally stable; and (3) climatic variations were the main cause of runoff declines over the entire basin during the 1990s and in the UZ, MZ and JZ areas during the 2000s, while direct human activities were most important in the DZ and BZ areas during the 2000s.

To evaluate the alteration of the hydrologic regime in the lower Yellow River caused by the different operational modes of the Sanmenxia and Xiaolangdi Reservoirs, daily stream flow data obtained from the Huayuankou Hydrological Station between 1949 and 2010 were analyzed. The hydrologic regimes before and after different reservoir operations were quantitatively analyzed using the range of variability approach (RVA) based on the indicators of hydrologic alteration (IHA). The results showed that the hydrologic regime of the lower Yellow River changed significantly after the reservoirs began operation, In addition, there was a significant difference in ecohydrological characteristics between operation modes. This research further explains the hydrologic regime of the river. It can be used for future water resources management and ecological scheduling within the lower Yellow River Basin.

The composition and change of runoff are closely related to climate change and human activities. To design effective watershed water resources management measures, there is a need for a clear understanding of the impact of climate change and human activities on baseflow and surface runoff. The purpose of this essay is to quantify their impact on the annual total stream flow, surface runoff, and base flow in the Weihe River Basin (WRB) using a two-stage annual precipitation partitioning method, wherein the surface runoff and base flow are separated from the measured total flow by using a one-parameter digital filter method for which the common filter parameter value is 0.925. The stream flow records were split into two periods: 1960–1970 (pre-change period) and 1971–2005 (post-change period) based on the hydrological breakpoints detected. We found that climate change and human activities have different impacts on base flow and surface runoff. We attributed the decrease in surface runoff due to climate change accounting for 76–78%, while we determined that human activities were responsible to the decrease in base flow accounting for 59–73% of the total observed change. We concluded that both climate change and human beings contributed to the hydrologic change through different hydrological processes: climate change dominated the surface runoff change, while human influences controlled the base flow change. To achieve the expected goals of ecological restoration, appropriate measures must be taken by watershed management in the WRB to mitigate the likely impacts of climate change on water hydrology.

Hydropower plant operation reorganizes the temporal and spatial distribution of water resources to promote the comprehensive utilization of water resources in the basin. However, a lot of uncertainties were brought to light concerning cascade hydropower plant operation with the introduction of the stochastic process of incoming runoff. Therefore, it is of guiding significance for the practice operation to investigate the stochastic operation of cascade hydropower plants while considering runoff uncertainty. The runoff simulation model was constructed by taking the cascade hydropower plants in the lower reaches of the Lancang River as the research object, and combining their data with the copula joint function and Gibbs method, and a Markov chain was adopted to construct the transfer matrix of runoff between adjacent months. With consideration for the uncertainty of inflow runoff, the stochastic optimal operation model of cascade hydropower plants was constructed and solved by the SDP algorithm. The results showed that 71.12% of the simulated monthly inflow of 5000 groups in the Nuozhadu hydropower plant drop into the reasonable range. Due to the insufficiency of measured runoff, there were too many 0 values in the derived transfer probability, but after the simulated runoff series were introduced, the results significantly improved. Taking the transfer probability matrix of simulated runoff as the input of the stochastic optimal operation model of the cascade hydropower plants, the operation diagram containing the future-period incoming water information was obtained, which could directly provide a reference for the optimal operation of the Nuozhadu hydropower plant. In addition, taking the incoming runoff process in a normal year as the standard, the annual mean power generation based on stochastic dynamic programming was similar to that based on dynamic programming (respectively 305.97 × 10⁸ $\mathrm{k}\mathrm{W}\cdot \mathrm{h}$ and 306.91 × 10⁸ $\mathrm{k}\mathrm{W}\cdot \mathrm{h}$), which proved that the operation diagram constructed in this study was reasonable.