Representing Irrigation Processes in the Land Surface‐Hydrological Model and a Case Study in the Yangtze River Basin, China

Abstract Irrigation is the dominant section of human water use, exerting essential impacts on hydrological processes and water resources. To more realistically simulate irrigation processes in water‐rich regions, an irrigation scheme is incorporated into a land surface‐hydrological model. It calculates the irrigation water requirement according to meteorological conditions, cropping area and growing stage, and root‐zone soil moisture, and determines the irrigation water withdrawal based on the available water resources as well as describing water extraction and irrigation processes in the model. The coupled model is applied to the Yangtze River Basin (YRB) in China, and verified using the observed daily river discharge from 1987 to 1990, evapotranspiration and irrigation amounts from 1999 to 2003. The results first show that the model can well reproduce hydrological processes within the basin, and the simulated irrigation largely agrees with the observation, in terms of annual irrigation and its spatial pattern. Second, inclusion of irrigation processes allows the model to better estimate evapotranspiration, with relative biases decreased from about −10% to −3%. It is also found that in comparison to arid/semi‐arid areas, although presenting a less effect on river discharge and groundwater, the irrigation in the YRB significantly alters hydrological processes through water redistribution. The irrigation‐induced evapotranspiration increment and runoff decrease indicate a shift in the surface water and energy balance, implying a potential effect on the atmosphere. Therefore, representing irrigation processes properly is important, particularly for understanding the coupling effect of the nature‐human system and improving the hydrological prediction accuracy.