Comparative Study for ECHAM5 and SDSM in Downscaling Temperature for a Geo-Climatically Diversified Region, Pakistan

Dildar Hussain Kazmi, Ghulam Rasul, Jianping Li, Suhail Babar Cheema

Research & Development Division, Pakistan Metrological Department, Islamabad, Pakistan.
State Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.

DOI: 10.4236/am.2014.51016                

Abstract

Pakistan is a country with diversified features in terms of geography and climate. It is an agriculture based country, mainly dependent on Indus water system. In Pakistan, there are loftyplateaus to the north and Arabian Sea in the south, while the interior portion is covered with plateaus or agriculture plains. For such a region, any attempt to monitor/analyze climatic data requires some more specific details. A statistical software “SDSM” is utilized for downscaling daily temperature data of Pakistan and the results generated are compared with the output of a recommended model “ECHAM5”. After analysis, it revealed that comparatively SDSM produced much better results. The outputs from both the approaches were correlated with the observed data; SDSM-observed gave values for correlation coefficient R² in the range of 81% - 94% whereas ECHAM5-observed produced 73% - 87% for different meteorological stations of Pakistan. On the basis of this study, SDSM can be recommended for future scenario generation of temperature data of Pakistan as well.

Keywords

Dynamic; Statistical; Future Scenario Generation

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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