Modi, Parthkumar A.Fuka, Daniel R.Easton, Zachary M.2022-04-262022-04-262021-06100830http://hdl.handle.net/10919/109745This study assessed the impacts of climate change on terrestrial hydrological components and Crop Water Use (CWU) over the Chesapeake Bay watershed using a combination of Global Climate Models (GCMs) and a land surface model. To better understand the impacts of climate change on the hydrological cycle, long-term simulations of multiple earth system models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP Phase 5) are statistically downscaled and bias-corrected using Multivariate Adaptive Constructed Analogs (MACA) scheme for use as model forcing. Precipitation indices from the twenty MACA-based GCMs are used to identify six best performing models. A mesoscale approach is developed, where CWU is estimated by accounting for the impacts of changing climate conditions and rising CO2 levels. Daily grid-based crop coefficients are derived from evapotranspiration data. The findings indicate a significant annual increase in precipitation (10 %) and temperature (+4.5 K) for the RCP 8.5 scenario towards the end of the 21st century. A significant reduction (13 % and 17 % respectively) in CWU is estimated for corn and soybeans, resulting from increased total precipitation and rising CO2 levels suppressing evapotranspiration. Our results indicate that even in a warmer regime, crop water use decreased due to rising CO2 concentrations due to climate change.application/pdfenCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 InternationalNoah-MPCrop water useMACAGlobal climate modelsClimate changeArticle - Refereedhttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejrh.2021.100830352214-5818