Abstract
This study was conducted to evaluate the impact of climate change on agricultural drought on 104 agricultural reservoirs in Korea. The bias corrected data appropriately reproduced the temporal trends of inflow from upstream river basins, irrigation water demand from paddy areas and reservoir storage level. When eleven climate model data were applied to a representative reservoir, inflow by individual models had a range of ‐11.5 to 11.1%, compared to the multi‐model ensembles mean value. Water demand also showed a similar trend to the inflow, had a range of ‐11.0 to 10.0%, while storage level had a narrow range of ‐3.9 to 2.1%. When 104 reservoirs were considered, inflow in the future period (2011 ~ 2040) increased by 7.8 and 9.3% for the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) 4.5 and 8.5 scenarios, respectively, mainly due to the increase in precipitation. Similarly, irrigation water demand increased by 2.3 and 1.6% for RCP4.5 and 8.5, respectively, due to the increase in temperature. As a result, the water storage level increased by 0.7 and 0.5% for RCP4.5 and 8.5, respectively. However, despite the increase in average reservoir storage level, the frequency of the number of droughts more severe than 10 year frequency drought increased. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.