Downscaling Ability of PRECIS over Snow-Covered Areas of Pakistan

The regional climate models are being used to investigate the future projections of climate change and their impacts in developing and developed countries of the world in the recent era. The present study is carried out to study the downscaling ability of a regional climate model named PRECIS (Providing Regional Climates for Impacts Studies) of Hadley Centre, Meteorological Office, U. K in mountainous regions of Pakistan. The model is applied to the Snow-covered areas of Pakistan with two different horizontal resolutions of 25 km and 50 km to study its ability to simulate the climate of regions of complex topography. The simulations of the model are compared with the observed meteorological data and CRU (Climate Research Unit) gridded data set. The results show that both simulations of PRECIS overestimate mean temperature for the Snow-covered areas of Pakistan. However, the difference between the model’s simulated temperature and the observed temperature is less for the 25 km simulation as compared to that of 50 km simulation. The comparison of the model used altitudes and actual altitudes shows that the main factor for these large biases is the topography of the model. The bias in the model may be decreased by updating the topography of the model which will enhance the confidence in the future predications provided by the model.