Climate Change and Hydro-climatology

Climate change impacts are the main concern for sustainability of water management and water use activities like agricultural production throughout the world. Climate changes alter regional hydrologic conditions and results in a variety of impacts on water resource systems. Such hydrologic changes will affect almost every aspect of human well-being. Since global warming has been strongly linked to changes in the global hydrological cycle such as increases of atmospheric water vapor resulting in changes of precipitation patterns intensity and extremes; reduced snow cover and the widespread melting of ice; and changes in soil moisture and runoff. In recent years concern has increased over climate change caused by increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide and other trace gases in the atmosphere. A major effect of climate change is likely to be alterations in hydrologic cycles and changes in water availability. The goal of this book is to assess the climate change impact on the hydro climatology. The book focus is on the development evaluation and use of regional and global models development of Earth system models and development of integrated assessment models to determine the impacts and possible mitigation of climate change. The GCM/RCM derived climate scenarios) were used for the climate projection. The statistical Downscaling Model (SDSM) was used to generate future possible local meteorological variables. The down-scaled data were then used as input to the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model to simulate the corresponding future hydrological variables. This is useful for researchers and scientists working on climate change hydrology climatology and policymakers of water resources planning and management.