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Assessment of present and future climate change over Kashmir Himalayas, India

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Abstract

Climate change over mountainous basins necessitates thorough understanding of present and future temperature and precipitation regimes for better water resource management, cryospheric resources, hydropower generation, natural hazard risk assessment, and ecosystem response. Global and regional climate models (GCMs/RCMs) do not represent valley/ridge scale interactions well. There are inherent model biases due to coarser reorientation of model forcings. The present study is an attempt to use the statistical downscaling model (SDSM) to calibrate and validate Canadian Earth System Model (CanESM2) outputs. The outputs have been compared with corresponding in situ observations available at six meteorological stations within the Kashmir basin in western Himalayas. Daily temperatures and precipitation records during present and future time slices have been considered. The three Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) were divided into three future time slices of 2030s, 2060s, and 2090s. Downscaled climate data reveals increase of the mean maximum temperature in the range of 0.3–2.3 °C and the mean minimum temperature increase from 0.3–1.9 °C under different RCPs when compared with the baseline period of 1980–2010. An increasing trend from 2 to 17% at different meteorological stations under different RCPs has been observed in precipitation. Seasonally, autumn shows the highest variability both in temperature and precipitation followed by spring.

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Acknowledgments

The acknowledgements are due to the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD), Srinagar, and National Data Centre, Pune, for necessary meteorological data. The authors would like to thank the developers of CanESM2 GCM and Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis (CCCma) for keeping the model data in public domain. Thanks are also to the anonymous reviewers and editor of the journal for their valuable suggestions and insightful comments. The authors appreciate the help provided by Dr. Musavir Ahmad, Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics, University of Kashmir, for English language corrections.

Funding

The first author received financial support from the University Grants Commission, New Delhi, in the form of UGC-NETJRF fellowship scheme. Pervez received financial support from the MOES & NCAOR under HiCOM initiative. AP Dimri received financial support from the MoEF&CC under NMHS.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Climate and Cryosphere Group, Department of Geography and Regional Development, University of Kashmir, Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India

    Mifta ul Shafiq, Shazia Ramzan & Pervez Ahmed

  2. Institute of Geographic Science and Natural Resources Research/Key Laboratory of Water Cycle and Related Land Surface Processes, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Rashid Mahmood

  3. School of Environmental Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

    A. P. Dimri

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  1. Mifta ul Shafiq
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Correspondence to Pervez Ahmed.

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Shafiq, M.u., Ramzan, S., Ahmed, P. et al. Assessment of present and future climate change over Kashmir Himalayas, India. Theor Appl Climatol 137, 3183–3195 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-019-02807-x

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