Title: Assessing the impact of global climatic changes on the regional hydrological ecosystems and resources

Authors: Faisal Nawaz; Syed Ahmad Hassan

Addresses: Dawood University of Engineering and Technology, Karachi, Pakistan ' Department of Mathematics, University of Karachi, Karachi, Pakistan

Abstract: Among the number of factors affecting the watershed ecosystem, climate is unique having significant links with systems and water resources. Precipitation, temperature, wind speed, humidity, cloud cover and bright sunshine are the major components affecting climate change. Their impacts on local hydroclimatic variables are very crucial and cannot be studied at the regional level. Global climate models are the most sophisticated and numerical based coupled method used for future projections of hydroclimatic change using different emission scenarios. The objective of this paper is to examine the hydroclimatic variables to analyse the past, present and future behaviours and their change using the statistical downscaling method. The statistical downscaling model, multiple linear regression and vector autoregression are utilised to calibrate and validate future local scale temperature, rainfall and river flow hydrology. The predicted values of temperature, rainfall and river flow from these approaches show significant results with both calibration and validation phases. Statistical investigations found that the vector autoregression method produces relatively better results. Hence, this may be the best option for the future generation of climate and hydrological conditions of the Pakistan region.

Keywords: climate change; global climate models; GCMs; vector autoregression; VAR; statistical downscaling model; SDSM; temperature; rainfall; river flow hydrology.

DOI: 10.1504/IJGW.2021.118360

International Journal of Global Warming, 2021 Vol.25 No.2, pp.191 - 211

Received: 20 Sep 2020
Accepted: 16 Feb 2021

Published online: 23 Oct 2021 *

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