ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Water and Wastewater Management
This article is part of the Research TopicWater Security and Risk Assessment Under Climate Change: Developing Strategies for a Resilient FutureView all articles
Evolution and Attribution Analysis of Baseflow on Both Banks of the Wei River Basin
Provisionally accepted
- 1Hebei University of Engineering, Handan, China
- 2China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing, China
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Baseflow is a crucial component of river runoff and a key element in maintaining river movement. Scientific and rational baseflow separation, along with quantitative analysis of the impacts of climate change and human activities on baseflow, is of great significance for maintaining river ecological health. This paper focuses on 18 tributaries along the north and south banks of the Wei River basin. Nine baseflow separation methods were compared to find the most suitable method for the Wei River basin. We quantitatively analyzed the impacts of climate change and human activities on baseflows. The results showed that the F2 method performed best, achieving the highest average NSE (0.73) and average KGE (0.76) across all 18 sites. Baseflow on both the north and south banks shows a non-significant increasing trend (P > 0.05). Baseflow on both banks was significantly affected by precipitation, with potential evapotranspiration on the south bank also having a significant impact (P<0.05). The main influencing factors leading to baseflow variability differed between the north and south banks. Baseflow variability at the Laoyukou, Dayu, and Luolicun stations on the south bank was mainly influenced by climate change (63.26%, 58.81%, and 74.55%, respectively). Meanwhile, on the north bank, only the Fenggeling and Qianyang stations showed baseflow variability primarily due to climate change (72.29% and 53.92%, respectively). However, the other 12 hydrological stations are mainly influenced by human activities.
Keywords: Baseflow index (BFI), Baseflow separation, Climate Change, Human Activities, runoff attribution
Received: 29 Dec 2025; Accepted: 29 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Jingjing, Tongning, Yaodong, Wenwei and Wei. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Liu Wei
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