Hydroclimatology of the Chitral River in the Indus Basin under Changing Climate

Abstract

Biased distribution of hydro-climate stations in high elevations are major obstacles for reliable appraisal of the hydro-climatic regime of the Chitral Basin located in the extreme north of Pakistan. We modeled this regime in the ARC-SWAT hydrological model forced with the latest gridded reanalysis ERA5 Land dataset, bias-corrected against a good quality reference dataset. The performance of the gridded dataset was cross-validated by comparing the model flow simulation against the observed flows. The ERA5 Land overall provided reasonably good estimates. The calibrated model on the daily time scale was able to provide excellent values of the employed statistical measures (NSE, KGE, PBIAS, RMSE and MAE). For a future climate change analysis, climate series was devised using two future projection scenarios (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) using the best performing GCM (MIROC5_rlilp1) out of five investigated GCMs. The results of the climate change analysis reveal increment in the average temperature up to +3.73 °C and +5.62 °C for RCP4.5 and RCP8.5, respectively, while the analysis of precipitation suggests an annual decrease up to −16% and −35% against RCP4.5 and RCP8.5, respectively, by the end of century. A future simulated flow analysis showed an increment of +0.25 % and decrease of −6.82% for RCP4.5 and RCP8.5, respectively. Further analysis of climate suggests seasonal deflections especially in precipitation and flow regimes. A notable climb in flow quantities was observed during spring season (MAM) in spite of the major reduction in precipitation amounts for that season. This implicitly supports a high rate of glacial/snow melt especially in the spring season during that period. Frequent droughts and floods are also projected by examining flow durations at each interval of the 21st century.