A novel partitioning of gross primary production and water use efficiency for sustaining water and food security using Budyko hypothesis

Debrupa Chatterjee; Pushpendra Kumar Singh; Dharmaveer Singh; Vijay P Singh

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.169283

A novel partitioning of gross primary production and water use efficiency for sustaining water and food security using Budyko hypothesis

Sci Total Environ. 2024 Feb 20:912:169283. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.169283. Epub 2023 Dec 16.

Authors

Debrupa Chatterjee¹, Pushpendra Kumar Singh², Dharmaveer Singh³, Vijay P Singh⁴

Affiliations

¹ Symbiosis Institute of Geo-informatics, Symbiosis International (Deemed University), Pune 411016, India.
² Water Resources Systems Division, National Institute of Hydrology, Roorkee 247667, India.
³ Symbiosis Institute of Geo-informatics, Symbiosis International (Deemed University), Pune 411016, India. Electronic address: veermnnit@gmail.com.
⁴ Department of Biological & Agricultural Engineering, Zachry Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-2117, USA.

PMID: 38110096
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.169283

Abstract

This study coupled the green water and blue water accounting with the existing standard Budyko framework and Fu's 1-parameter Budyko framework to diagnose the basin hydrological behavior. Both Budyko frameworks were employed to determine green water consumption (ET_Green) and blue water consumption (ET_Blue) which, in turn, were used to map the blue water index (BWI) hotspots and green water index (GWI) bright spots. The relative contributions of green water and blue water were quantified for sustaining water and food security. A new methodology is proposed using BWI and GWI for partitioning the Gross Primary Production (GPP) and Water Use Efficiency (WUE) into GPP_Blue, GPP_Green and WUE_Blue and WUE_Green. The methodology was applied to five sub-basins of the Central Godavari River Basin (CGRB): Purna, Dhalegaon, GR Bridge, Yeli and Delta. Results showed that all five basins exhibited larger deviations from the theoretical Budyko curve of Fu's 1-parameter Budyko framework than did the standard Budyko framework and the Dhalegaon basin showed the largest deviations. The partitioning of GPP and WUE by the proposed methodology showed that the proportion of GPP_Green to the total GPP was much higher than that of the GPP_Blue. Similarly, the proportion of WUE_Green to WUE was more than that of WUE_Blue. The mapping of GPP_Blue and GPP_Green, and WUE_Blue and WUE_Green showed that the Delta and Yeli basins had the highest values of both GPP_Green & GPP_Blue and WUE_Blue and WUE_Green (bright spot basins) and the Dhalegaon and parts of GR Bridge basin had the lowest values (hot spot basins). The proposed partitioning of GPP and WUE will help identify the relative contributions of green water and blue water (for managing agricultural waters) and formulate agronomical and engineering practices for stakeholders and policy makers for increasing the overall WUE and GPP to sustain water and food security.

Keywords: BWI and GWI; Budyko framework; GPP and WUE partitioning; Green water and blue water accounting; Hotspots and bright spots; Sensitivity analysis.

MeSH terms

Agriculture
Food Security
Hydrology*
Rivers
Water*

Substances

Water