Projecting future hydrological and ecological droughts with the climate and land use scenarios over the Korean peninsula

It is uncertain how global climate change will influence future drought characteristics over the Korean peninsula. This study aims to project the future droughts using climate change and land use change scenarios over the Korean peninsula with the land surface modeling system, i.e., Weather Research and Forecasting Model Hydrological modeling system (WRF-Hydro). The Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) 2.6 and 8.5 are used as future climate scenarios and the Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs), specifically SSP2, is adopted for the land use scenario. The using Threshold Level Method (TLM), we identify future hydrological and ecological drought events with runoff and Net Primary Productivity (NPP), respectively, and assess drought characteristics of durations and intensities in different scenarios. Results show that the duration of drought is longer over RCP2.6-SSP2 for near future (2031-2050) and RCP8.5-SSP2 (2080-2099) for the far future for hydrological drought. On the other hand, RCP2.6-SSP2 for the far future and RCP8.5-SSP2 for the near future show longer duration for ecological drought. In addition, the drought intensities in both hydrological and ecological drought show different characteristics with the drought duration. The intensity of the hydrological droughts was greatly affected by threshold level methods and RCP2.6-SSP2 for far future shows the severest intensity. However, for ecological drought, the difference of the intensity among the threshold level is not significant and RCP2.6-SSP2 for near future and RCP2.6-SSP2 for near future show the severest intensity. This study suggests a possible future drought characteristics is in the Korea peninsula using combined climate and land use changes, which will help the community to understand and manage the future drought risks.