Abstract:
Pakistan, a resource stressed country, is considered among the top-ranked countries that are being and going to be adversely affected by climate change impacts. Moreover, Pakistan lacks in resources to properly monitor the climate processes; it has a sparse network of ground-based gauge stations. However, recent technological advancements offer some alternatives to ground-based observations; these alternatives include satellite- and model-based climate datasets. This study first evaluates precipitation and temperature datasets from such a model-based climate dataset (namely ERA5) using data observed at 15 ground-based gauge stations as reference, and then it conducts a comprehensive climate profiling and spatial trend analyses of Pakistan using ERA5. Initial evaluation was conducted at daily and monthly time scales and the results show that ERA5, despite some discrepancies, quite efficiently match the fluctuation patterns of observed data as it showed acceptable values of correlation coefficient (CC) at both daily (precipitation CC: 0.35, temperature CC: 0.96) and monthly (precipitation CC: 0.76, temperature CC: 0.98) time scales. Climate profiling and trend analyses using ERA5 climate data concluded that the annual precipitation in KPK has strong decreasing trends up to 10 mm/year and most regions (including the northern glacial regions) of Pakistan are getting hotter with the spatial trends showing an increase in temperature of above 5 oC/century. Moreover, most regions of Pakistan are getting drier and hotter due to which there could be increasing frequencies and intensities of extreme events in Pakistan. The findings of this study might be beneficial for various stakeholders / target sectors including researchers investigating climate change impacts, water resource management sectors, and water and power regulatory authorities.
