This study examines changes in water yield by determining turning points in the direction of yield changes and highlights that regime shifts in historical water yield occurred in the Upper Brahmaputra River basin, both the climate and cryosphere affect the magnitude of water yield increases, climate determined the declining trends in water yield, and meltwater has the potential to alleviate the water shortage. A repository for all source files is made available.

The retreat of glaciers over the QTP is intensifying. To understand changes in glaciers, the two inventories (RGI 4.0 and GIC-Ⅱ) provide potential, but glacier volumes are not convincing. The study recalculated and compared glacier volumes in RGI 4.0 and GIC-Ⅱ for the QTP. The results indicate the slope-dependent algorithm performs better than area-volume-based equations. The northern QTP has a larger degree of fragmentation. An obvious offset of glacier volumes in different aspects is observed.

The effects of WRF domain configurations and spin-up time on rainfall were evaluated at high temporal and spatial scales for simulating an extreme sub-daily heavy rainfall (SDHR) event. Both objective verification metrics and subjective verification were used to identify the likely best set of the configurations. Results show that re-evaluation of these WRF settings is of great importance in improving the accuracy and reliability of the rainfall simulations in the regional SDHR applications.

The blue and green water resources in the upper Yellow River basin (UYRB) were evaluated by the SWAT model in this study. The results show that the average annual total amount of water resources in the UYRB was 140.5 billion m³, in which the blue water resources is 37.8 billion m³, and green water resources is 107.7 billion m³. The intra-annual variability, inter-annual variabilityand spatial distribution of the blue water and green water is relatively similar.

To further protect the ecology of the study area, remote sensing image technology is used to analyze the temporal and spatial distribution characteristics of vegetation in the Yarlung Zangbo River Basin by splicing the remote sensing image of a time series (from February 2000 to December 2016). It can be found that vegetation coverage is better in low elevation areas,vegetation change shows a weak sustainability and the vegetation growth is more affected by the temperature than the precipitation.