PMD holds workshop on water resources

Islamabad :The Pakistan Meteorological Department on Monday organised a workshop here on the projects on the 'Interaction of westerly and summer monsoon in upper Indus basin and its impact on water resources,' and 'projection and attribution of stream flow composition in mountain rivers in China and Pakistan'.

Federal Flood Commission Chairman Ahmad Kamal was the chief guest on the occasion, where Prof. Dr. M. Ashraf of the Pakistan Science Foundation, Dr. Tariq Banuri of the Global Change Impact Studies Centre and eminent scientists from both the countries were in attendance.

Both these projects have been jointly funded by Pakistan Science Foundation (PSF) and National Science Foundation of China (NSFC). The PMD said the projects besides exploiting the available scientific knowledge and technological advancements would add additional knowledge about the hydro-meteorological aspects in the country, especially in the northern areas, where bulk of frozen water reserves are present in the form of snow and glaciers. It said the projects were meant to understand the current and future state of stream flows in snow and ice dominated regions along with rapid changing climate in the region.

The PMD said the final results would help address the societal needs of the community in the perception of environmental and ecological changes due to climate change. Two river basins (Tarim River, China and Chitral River, Pakistan) have been selected as pilot basins. The project implementation frame work for developing consistent climate change scenarios, universal applicable hydrological models and potential outputs was framed by mutual consultations among the scientists of both the sides.

From China, the climate modeling team of China Meteorological Administration (CMA) and a group of ecological scientist from Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) will be engaged in research with PMD researchers.

During the next two years monitoring instruments of glacier retreat and changing stream flows will be undertaken and scientist will conduct several field visits to the selected glaciated basins of Chinese and Pakistani sides.

The future climate change scenarios will be developed on finest resolution and the resulted stream flows will be projected to assess the availability of water resources from snow and glaciers. In addition, the liquid and solid precipitation will be differentiated so that flood forecasting model could be tuned to incorporate the future prospects of frozen as well as liquid water resources.