Comparative Study for ECHAM5 and SDSM in Downscaling Temperature for a Geo-Climatically Diversified Region, Pakistan

Pakistan is a country with diversified features in terms of geography and climate. It is an agriculture based country, mainly dependent on Indus water system. In Pakistan, there are loftyplateaus to the north and Arabian Sea in the south, while the interior portion is covered with plateaus or agriculture plains. For such a region, any attempt to monitor/analyze climatic data requires some more specific details. A statistical software “SDSM” is utilized for downscaling daily temperature data of Pakistan and the results generated are compared with the output of a recommended model “ECHAM5”. After analysis, it revealed that comparatively SDSM produced much better results. The outputs from both the approaches were correlated with the observed data; SDSM-observed gave values for correlation coefficient R2 in the range of 81% - 94% whereas ECHAM5-observed produced 73% - 87% for different meteorological stations of Pakistan. On the basis of this study, SDSM can be recommended for future scenario generation of temperature data of Pakistan as well.