Assessing the Impact of Climate Change on the Hydrological Parameters Using Statistical Downscaling

Abstract

Water resources in India are already under tremendous strain due to population explosion and urbanization. But the problem is compounded by the climate change due to global warming. Proper evaluation of this climate change is a must for planning and mitigation of water resources. This work is aimed to assess the impact of climate change in the Indian subcontinent using statistical downscaling methods from GCMs which are derived from HADCM2 and HADCM3 ensembles using IPCC AR4 (SRES) and CANESM2 using IPCC AR5 (RCP). This study tries to investigate the relationships between the various atmospheric and surface variables. The 26 predictor variables of all the GCMS were considered for selected regions for the temperature and precipitation predictands.The temporal stability of the key predictor-predictand relationships was also checked for the GCMs using different decades and comparing them. Two regions were selected Rourkela and Mumbai. One is an urban area another the largest metro The CanESM2 was not found suitable for analysis of Rourkela region. Then the future trends in rainfall and temperature are discussed. The trend analysis was performed using Mann-Kendall test and Sen-slope estimator.