This study shows the impact of a changing climate on hydrological drought. The study illustrates that an alternative drought identification that considers adaptation to an altered hydrological regime has a substantial influence on the way in which drought impact is calculated. The obtained results show that an adaptive threshold approach is the way forward to study the impact of climate change on the identification and characterization of hydrological drought events.

In order to assess high-resolution precipitation fields for the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayan Arc, a novel downscaling approach is presented which integrates traditional statistical downscaling and GIS-based terrain parameterization techniques. The approach enables a detailed analysis of the precipitation heterogeinity over the complex target area.

The radiative forcing of land use and land cover change activities has recently been computed for a set of forcing agents including long-lived greenhouse gases, short-lived agents (ozone and aerosols), and land surface albedo change. Here we address where the global forcing comes from and what land use activities, such as deforestation or agriculture, contribute the most forcing. We find that changes in forest and crop area can be used to predict the land use radiative forcing in some regions.

Ambitious hydropower plans in the Eastern Himalayas prominently involve the private finance sector. We question the framing of hydropower as green energy, interrogate its links with climate change, and examine its potential for investment and capital accumulation and show a number of serious contradictions. Impacts cannot be simply predicted, controlled or mitigated. More focus on political economic drivers and geo-ecological uncertainties infused with localized understandings is sorely needed.

Based on a farm household survey of 450 farmers, this study examined the adaptation to climate change and factors affecting the adoption of various adaptation measures at the farm level in Pakistan. The study demonstrates that awareness of climate change is widespread in the area, and farmers are adapting their crops to climate variability. However the adaptation process is constrained due to several factors such as lack of information, lack of money, lack of resources and shortage of water.

Near-natural Himalayan treelines are usually krummholz treelines, which are relatively unresponsive to climate change. Intense recruitment of treeline trees suggests a great potential for future treeline advance. Competitive abilities of tree seedlings within krummholz thickets and dwarf scrub heaths will be a major source of variation in treeline dynamics. Tree growth-climate relationships show mature treeline trees to be responsive in particular to high pre-monsoon temperature trends.

We assessed future changes in high and low flows globally using runoff projections from global hydrological models (GHMs) driven by global climate models (GCMs) under the RCP8.5 scenario. Further, we quantified the relative size of uncertainty from GHMs and from GCMs using ANOVA. We show that GCMs are the major contributors to uncertainty overall, but GHMs increase their contribution for low flows and can equal or outweigh GCM uncertainty in snow-dominated areas for both high and low flows.

We quantify uncertainties in estimates of global temperature change from regional and sectoral territorial- and consumption-based emissions. We find that the uncertainties are sensitive to the emission allocations, mix of pollutants, the metric used and its time horizon, and the level of aggregation of the results. Uncertainties in the final results are dominated by metric parameters and emission uncertainties, while the economic data appear to have small uncertainties at the national level.

A three-step climate classification – input variable selection, principal components analysis and k-means clustering – was applied to a spatial domain covering the Himalayan arc and adjacent plains regions using input data from four global meteorological reanalyses. This revealed a reanalysis ensemble consensus for eight macro-climate zones. Zonal statistics revealed consistent, distinct climatologies. This approach has implications for resource assessments and data set bias characterisations.

Rapidly rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations caused by human actions over the past 250 years have raised cause for concern that changes in Earth’s climate system may progress at a much faster pace and larger extent than during the past 20,000 years. Questions that yet need to be answered are what the carbon uptake kinetics of the oceans will be in the future and how the increase in oceanic carbon inventory will affect its ecosystems. Major future ocean carbon research challenges are discussed.

Connections between time series should be studied with methods developed in time series analysis rather than with cross-correlation coefficients and regression equations. The approach includes time series modeling in both time and frequency domains. Two climatic time series with zero cross correlation are shown to be closely connected at timescales from 2.5 to 10 years and a full time- and frequency-domain description of the system is given for this teleconnection in a climate system.