Climate change assessment under greenhouse gases emission scenarios: Urmia Lake Basin

Abstract

In the past few decades, an increase in greenhouse gases has caused global climate imbalance on the Earth which is referred to as "climate change". Studies have shown that this phenomenon has direct and indirect impacts on the natural, economic and social systems. Given the importance and necessity of the phenomenon, “Urmia Lake Basin” was selected to study the impacts of climate change on climatic parameters. The large-scale outputs of HadCM3 general circulation models were downscaled using multi-linear SDSM model under the emission scenarios of A2 and B2 for the period of 2050s. Based on the results, the daily precipitation has different fluctuations in the coming period. Using HadCM3 model in the basin showed that the amount of precipitation in the period of 2050s will decrease 0.1 mm under the A2 scenario while will increase 0.03 mm under the B2 scenario. Precipitation will show reduction in winter and spring while will increase in summer and autumn under the both emission scenarios. The results revealed that average temperature will increase 1.2 and 1.1 °C under A2 and B2 scenarios, respectively; also, the highest increase in temperature will be up to 1.5 °C in winter under A2 scenario and 1.4 °C in summer under B2 scenario. The findings of this study can be used to estimate the changes induced in groundwater and surface water resources of the basin, changes in the yield of crops and ranglelands and the occurrence of climate extremes such as droughts and floods in the future.

Keywords

• downscaling
• greenhouse gases
• aogcm
• hadcm3
• sdsm