Abstract

It is widely accepted that General Circulation Models (GCMs) are physically based means for formulating climate scenarios. At the global and continental scale the climate prediction is good but GCMs may not provide the required climate features, in many of the regional and local-scale processes, which are needed for climate change impact studies. Therefore, downscaling is required to develop climate scenarios of higher spatial resolutions. Also the simulated data for different GCMs is freely available at IPCC data distribution Centre, but to extract the data for a particular region and convert it to a user readable format, different software packages are required. This study presents a decision support tool to select a suitable GCM for any specific region, based on statistical parameters such as coefficient of determination (R2) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). The tool also provides the facility to obtain the simulated data for different GCMs in the excel format. Delta change method is incorporated as a downscaling technique to project future climate scenarios. To demonstrate the application of the tool, future air surface temperature and precipitation scenarios are projected for 2021-2050, using data for four meteorological stations from upper Jhelum basin, Pakistan.

Keywords: Climate change; Delta change; GCM; Downscaling