Due to climate change and human activities over the last fifty years, the spring flowvolume of karst groundwater has sharply diminished in China. Climate change is one of the criticalfactors that initiates a series of karst hydrogeologic and water ecological environmental problems,because the precipitation shows a decreasing trend while the temperature shows an increasing trend.The Jinci Spring is one of the largest, most famous springs in northern China. This study employeddata from the Taiyuan Meteorological Station and ten precipitation stations in and around the JinciSpring region as well as the runoff data gathered from two hydrological monitoring stations during1960-2012. The sliding average method and the Mann-Kendall test were used to analyze the variationtendency of precipitation, temperature, and land evaporation in this area. Finally, the followingwere calculated: the varying pattern of the karst groundwater recharge amount and the responseof the recharge amount to precipitation, land evaporation, and river runoff by quantitative analysis.The results indicated that the precipitation and land evaporation amount decreased at first and thensubsequently increased. Likewise, the variation trend of the karst groundwater recharge amountin the spring region was roughly consistent with the precipitation variation pattern. In contrast,the temperature displayed an increasing trend. The climate change resulted in a reduction of thekarst groundwater recharge amount, and it had the greatest influence in the 1990s, which caused thekarst groundwater recharge amount to decrease 26.75 mm as compared to that of the 1960s (about39.68% lower than that of the 1960s). The Jinci Spring had zero flow during this period. The reductionin precipitation was one of main factors that caused the cutoff of the Jinci Spring.
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