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      Future changes in hydro-climatic extremes in the Upper Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra River basins

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          Abstract

          Future hydrological extremes, such as floods and droughts, may pose serious threats for the livelihoods in the upstream domains of the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra. For this reason, the impacts of climate change on future hydrological extremes is investigated in these river basins. We use a fully-distributed cryospheric-hydrological model to simulate current and future hydrological fluxes and force the model with an ensemble of 8 downscaled General Circulation Models (GCMs) that are selected from the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios. The model is calibrated on observed daily discharge and geodetic mass balances. The climate forcing and the outputs of the hydrological model are used to evaluate future changes in climatic extremes, and hydrological extremes by focusing on high and low flows. The outcomes show an increase in the magnitude of climatic means and extremes towards the end of the 21 st century where climatic extremes tend to increase stronger than climatic means. Future mean discharge and high flow conditions will very likely increase. These increases might mainly be the result of increasing precipitation extremes. To some extent temperature extremes might also contribute to increasing discharge extremes, although this is highly dependent on magnitude of change in temperature extremes. Low flow conditions may occur less frequently, although the uncertainties in low flow projections can be high. The results of this study may contribute to improved understanding on the implications of climate change for the occurrence of future hydrological extremes in the Hindu Kush–Himalayan region.

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          An Overview of CMIP5 and the Experiment Design

          The fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) will produce a state-of-the- art multimodel dataset designed to advance our knowledge of climate variability and climate change. Researchers worldwide are analyzing the model output and will produce results likely to underlie the forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Unprecedented in scale and attracting interest from all major climate modeling groups, CMIP5 includes “long term” simulations of twentieth-century climate and projections for the twenty-first century and beyond. Conventional atmosphere–ocean global climate models and Earth system models of intermediate complexity are for the first time being joined by more recently developed Earth system models under an experiment design that allows both types of models to be compared to observations on an equal footing. Besides the longterm experiments, CMIP5 calls for an entirely new suite of “near term” simulations focusing on recent decades and the future to year 2035. These “decadal predictions” are initialized based on observations and will be used to explore the predictability of climate and to assess the forecast system's predictive skill. The CMIP5 experiment design also allows for participation of stand-alone atmospheric models and includes a variety of idealized experiments that will improve understanding of the range of model responses found in the more complex and realistic simulations. An exceptionally comprehensive set of model output is being collected and made freely available to researchers through an integrated but distributed data archive. For researchers unfamiliar with climate models, the limitations of the models and experiment design are described.
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            Climate extremes indices in the CMIP5 multimodel ensemble: Part 2. Future climate projections

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              Climate extremes indices in the CMIP5 multimodel ensemble: Part 1. Model evaluation in the present climate

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Formal analysisRole: InvestigationRole: MethodologyRole: VisualizationRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Formal analysisRole: InvestigationRole: MethodologyRole: VisualizationRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: InvestigationRole: MethodologyRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Formal analysisRole: InvestigationRole: VisualizationRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: InvestigationRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: MethodologyRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: MethodologyRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )
                1932-6203
                29 December 2017
                2017
                : 12
                : 12
                : e0190224
                Affiliations
                [1 ] FutureWater, Costerweg 1V, Wageningen, The Netherlands
                [2 ] Utrecht University, Department of Physical Geography, Utrecht, The Netherlands
                [3 ] International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, Khumaltar, Kathmandu, Nepal
                Universidade de Vigo, SPAIN
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: We have the following interests: RRW, AFL, SK, and WWI are employed by FutureWater. There are no patents, products in development or marketed products to declare. This does not alter our adherence to all the PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2131-9761
                Article
                PONE-D-17-16539
                10.1371/journal.pone.0190224
                5747487
                29287098
                758a206c-51d1-4030-a7b1-9cdc71e9df99
                © 2017 Wijngaard et al

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 29 April 2017
                : 11 December 2017
                Page count
                Figures: 7, Tables: 6, Pages: 26
                Funding
                Funded by: International Development Research Centre (CA)
                Funded by: Department for International Development (GB)
                Funded by: H2020 European Research Council (BE)
                Award ID: 676819
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100003246, Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek;
                Award ID: 016.161.208
                Award Recipient :
                This work was carried out as part of the Himalayan Adaptation, Water and Resilience (HIAWARE) consortium under the Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia (CARIAA) with financial support from the UK Government’s Department for International Development (DFID) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Ottawa, Canada. This work was also partially supported by core funds of ICIMOD contributed by the governments of Afghanistan, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Norway, Pakistan, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 676819). This work is part of the research programme VIDI with project number 016.161.208, which is (partly) financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). DFID and IDRC funds the HI-AWARE consortium, of which ICIMOD and FutureWater are consortium members. These funds partly supported the contributions of RRW, AFL, SN, SK, SP, ABS, and WWI. ICIMOD core funds partly funded the contributions of SN, SK, SP, and ABS. ERC partly funded the contribution of WWI through grant agreement 676819. VIDI partly funded the contribution of WWI through project 016.161.208. RRW, AFL, SK, and WWI are employed by FutureWater. FutureWater provided support in the form of salaries for authors RRW, AFL, SK, and WWI, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.
                Categories
                Research Article
                Earth Sciences
                Glaciology
                Glaciers
                Earth Sciences
                Atmospheric Science
                Meteorology
                Snow
                Earth Sciences
                Atmospheric Science
                Meteorology
                Rain
                Earth Sciences
                Atmospheric Science
                Climatology
                Climate Change
                Earth Sciences
                Atmospheric Science
                Climatology
                Climate Modeling
                Physical Sciences
                Physics
                Condensed Matter Physics
                Phase Transitions
                Sublimation
                Earth Sciences
                Hydrology
                Flooding
                Earth Sciences
                Marine and Aquatic Sciences
                Bodies of Water
                Rivers
                Ecology and Environmental Sciences
                Aquatic Environments
                Freshwater Environments
                Rivers
                Earth Sciences
                Marine and Aquatic Sciences
                Aquatic Environments
                Freshwater Environments
                Rivers
                Custom metadata
                All data generated in this study are available via Figshare: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5674483.v1.

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