Land use as a mitigation strategy for the water-quality impacts of global warming: a scenario analysis on two watersheds in the Ohio River Basin

This study uses an integrative approach to study the water-quality impacts of future global climate and land-use changes. In this study, changing land-use types was used as a mitigation strategy to reduce the adverse impacts of global climate change on water resources. The climate scenarios were based on projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Kingdom Hadley Centre's climate model (HadCM2). The Thornthwaite water-balance model was coupled with a land-use model (L-THIA) to investigate the hydrologic effects of future climate and land-use changes in the Ohio River Basin. The land-use model is based on the Soil Conservation Service's curve-number method. It uses the curve number, an index [...]