Precipitation Trends over the Indus Basin
1
Department of Civil Engineering and NOAA-CREST, City College of New York, New York, NY 10031, USA
2
U.S.–Pakistan Center for Advanced Studies in Water, Mehran University of Engineering and Technology, Jamshoro 76062, Pakistan
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Climate 2019, 7(10), 116; https://doi.org/10.3390/cli7100116
Received: 22 July 2019 / Revised: 9 September 2019 / Accepted: 12 September 2019 / Published: 26 September 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue From Local to Global Precipitation Dynamics and Climate Interaction)
A large population relies on water input to the Indus basin, yet basinwide precipitation amounts and trends are not well quantified. Gridded precipitation data sets covering different time periods and based on either station observations, satellite remote sensing, or reanalysis were compared with available station observations and analyzed for basinwide precipitation trends. Compared to observations, some data sets tended to greatly underestimate precipitation, while others overestimate it. Additionally, the discrepancies between data set and station precipitation showed significant time trends in many cases, suggesting that the precipitation trends of those data sets were not consistent with station data. Among the data sets considered, the station-based Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) gridded data set showed good agreement with observations in terms of mean amount, trend, and spatial and temporal pattern. GPCC had average precipitation of about 500 mm per year over the basin and an increase in mean precipitation of about 15% between 1891 and 2016. For the more recent past, since 1958 or 1979, no significant precipitation trend was seen. Among the remote sensing based data sets, the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission Multi-Satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) compared best to station observations and, though available for a shorter time period than station-based data sets such as GPCC, may be especially valuable for parts of the basin without station data. The reanalyses tended to have substantial biases in precipitation mean amount or trend relative to the station data. This assessment of precipitation data set quality and precipitation trends over the Indus basin may be helpful for water planning and management.
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Keywords:
precipitation; South Asia; Indus basin; climate change
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MDPI and ACS Style
Krakauer, N.Y.; Lakhankar, T.; Dars, G.H. Precipitation Trends over the Indus Basin. Climate 2019, 7, 116. https://doi.org/10.3390/cli7100116
AMA Style
Krakauer NY, Lakhankar T, Dars GH. Precipitation Trends over the Indus Basin. Climate. 2019; 7(10):116. https://doi.org/10.3390/cli7100116
Chicago/Turabian StyleKrakauer, Nir Y.; Lakhankar, Tarendra; Dars, Ghulam H. 2019. "Precipitation Trends over the Indus Basin" Climate 7, no. 10: 116. https://doi.org/10.3390/cli7100116
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