With global climate change and increasingly extreme weather conditions, the water quality of the Lijiang River Basin (LRB) is facing huge threats. At present, there is still a lack of systematic research on water quality indicators and the influence of indirect factors such as meteorological factors on it in the LRB. Therefore, this study is based on the meteorological, hydrological, and water quality data of the LRB from 2012 to 2018, using the Mann-Kendall test, Morlet wavelet method, Spearman's rank correlation coefficient, sensitivity, and contribution rate to quantitative analysis of the relationship between climate conditions and water quality indicators. The results show that the change trends of these hydrological and climatic conditions have almost no significant sudden change; precipitation and streamflow are decreasing each year; the streamflow trend exhibits time hysteresis; precipitation has a stronger influence downstream than on the local area; water quality indicators of both stations exhibited a change period of around 18 to 20 months, with the exception of pH. Water quality indicators are insensitive to precipitation and streamflow, and sensitive to humidity and wind speed; DO was negatively correlated with climate indicators apart from wind speed; almost all water quality indicators in Yangshuo are highly sensitive to air temperature, and the contribution rate of air temperature to ORP and TP reached 4.81% and 3.56%, respectively; sunshine duration has a positive impact on reducing NH4-N and TP. The difference between Yangshuo and Guilin is mostly due to the input of external sources on both sides of the Lijiang River, which results in variations in climate conditions sensitivities.
Keywords: Climate condition; Contribution rate; Dominant factor; Lijiang river basin; Sensitivity coefficient; Water quality.
© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.