2-Assessment of Impact of Global Climate Change on Precipitation at Regional Scales.

Abstract

Global climate change is known to influence regional hydrology, through changes in patterns of precipitation, stream flow and other hydrologic variables. With several plausible climate change scenarios in place for future, it is important to assess the possible impact on water resources, arising out of such scenarios. Such an exercise involves projections of climatic variables (e.g., temperature, humidity, mean sea level pressure etc.) at global scales, downscaling of larger scale climatic variables to local scale hydrologic variables and computation of hydrologic risk for use in water resources planning and management. Uncertainties due to future climate scenarios should be addressed in the estimation of hydrologic risk due to climate change impacts. This paper presents a broad overview of different approaches of downscaling and uncertainty modeling in assessing hydrologic implications of global climate change with a case study of Orissa meteorological subdivision.