Future climate and runoff projections across South Asia from CMIP5 global climate models and hydrological modelling

Abstract

Study region: The South Asia. Study focus: This paper presents future climate and runoff projections for the South Asia region under the RCP8.5 scenario with climate change informed by 42 CMIP5 GCMs. Runoff is projected for 0.5° grids using hydrological models with future climate inputs obtained by empirically scaling the historical climate series. New hydrological insights: The modelling results indicate that future runoff will increase throughout most of the region except in the far north-east and far north-west. The median projection shows increases in mean annual runoff of 20–30% in the Indian sub-continent for 2046–2075 relative to 1976–2005. The change in runoff is driven mainly by the change in precipitation, moderated (in wetter futures) or intensified (in drier futures) by higher temperature and potential evaporation. The paper also investigates the uncertainties of the projection due to scaling methods and selection of GCMs. The difference in runoff projections from different scaling methods is small relative to the large uncertainty in precipitation projections from the GCMs. Sub-selecting only the “better” performing GCMs shows marginal difference in the uncertainty range of projected runoff. For the broad scale projections presented here, it is best to use projections informed by all the GCMs to provide an indication of the full uncertainty range.