Evaluating the impact of climate change on extreme temperature and precipitation events over the Kashmir Himalaya

Shafkat Ahsan,Hakim Farooq,Akhtar Alam,M Sultan Bhat,Hilal Ahmad Shiekh

doi:10.1007/s00382-021-05984-6

Shafkat Ahsan, Hakim Farooq + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-021-05984-6

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Abstract

The frequency and severity of climatic extremes is expected to escalate in the future primarily because of the increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. This study aims to assess the impact of climate change on the extreme temperature and precipitation scenarios using climate indices in the Kashmir Himalaya. The analysis has been carried out for the twenty-first century under different representative concentration pathways (RCPs) through the Statistical Downscaling Model (SDSM) and ClimPACT2. The simulation reveals that the climate in the region will get progressively warmer in the future by increments of 0.36–1.48 °C and 0.65–1.07 °C in mean maximum and minimum temperatures respectively, during 2080s (2071–2100) relative to 1980–2010 under RCP8.5. The annual precipitation is likely to decrease by a maximum of 2.09–6.61% (2080s) under RCP8.5. The seasonal distribution of precipitation is expected to alter significantly with winter, spring, and summer seasons marking reductions of 9%, 5.7%, and 1.7%, respectively during 2080s under RCP8.5. The results of extreme climate evaluation show significant increasing trends for warm temperature-based indices and decreasing trends for cold temperature-based indices. Precipitation indices on the other hand show weaker and spatially incoherent trends with a general tendency towards dry regimes. The projected scenarios of extreme climate indices may result in large-scale adverse impacts on the environment and ecological resource base of the Kashmir Himalaya.

Highlights

Climate change is central to the global environmental management and sustainability issues of the twenty-first century, given its implications to natural and human systems (Campbell et al 2011; Gan et al 2015)
The selected predictors for Tmax, Tmin, and Prcp. are similar to the type of predictors that have been chosen in previous studies in and around Kashmir Himalayas (Mahmood and Babel 2013, 2014; Mahmood et al 2015; Shafiq et al 2019)
The patterns of increase revealed the orographic controls with the high altitude areas registering relatively higher

Summary

Introduction

Climate change is central to the global environmental management and sustainability issues of the twenty-first century, given its implications to natural and human systems (Campbell et al 2011; Gan et al 2015). The study of extreme weather and climate events has attained significant attention, the majority of studies on long-term climate changes have focused on changes in mean values (Kostopoulou and Jones 2005; Alexander et al 2006). This is primarily because of the lack of long-term high-quality observational data, required for the detection and attribution of the extremes (Zhang et al 2005). Global circulation models (GCMs) provide a promising option for simulating the present and future climates and generation of long-term time-series data, which can be used to analyze the possible changes in future extreme events (Sillman and Roeckner 2008)

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