CLIMATE VARIABILITY AND RAINFALL PATTERNS IN PAKISTAN: IMPLICATIONS FOR AGRICULTURE AND WATER RESOURCES

Abstract

Pakistan is an important region for rainfall, agriculture, water resources, and climatic resilience. However, in the past few decades it has been observed that Pakistan is facing instability, and unpredictability of rainfalls that led to the dramatic manifestation including floods and long

spells of droughts. This paper focuses on long and annual rainfall variations between 1991 and 2022 in Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi having variant climate. The study makes use of ground station and statistic evidence to study the annual and the seasonal variation in the monsoon, winter, pre-monsoon and post-monsoon seasons. It is observed that the cities have significant variations; Islamabad holds huge rainfall; Lahore lies in moderate continuous trends and Karachi has low and continuously centered rainfall trends. Research contributes in making effective strategies to manage water resources, agriculture and catastrophes with regards to vulnerability of urban and environmental systems to climate variability.

BACKGROUND

Pakistan also falls into the list of those countries which are highly exposed to the impacts of climate change with little or no contributions to greenhouse gas emissions in the world. The nation had witnessed a number of climate related disasters in the past few decades, especially those caused by abnormal rainfall performances. Extreme weather is reflected strongly by observations on the 2010 mega flood and repetitive droughts, which affected infrastructure, agriculture and livelihoods terribly. Only between 51 and 90 percent of the disasters in Pakistan are climate related, the variability of the precipitation being one of the main factors. Previous trends analysis papers examined the trend with the Mann-Kendall test and Sen estimate industrial slope, which indicated that rainfall trends change considerably between seasons across the countries. Their evidence included a growing and a declining trend evident in the monsoon and pre-monsoon seasons, respectively, while the winter season signaled a declining trend that affects agriculture and water management systems [1-4]. The more recent study by Ahmad et al. (2023) pointed out the need for high-resolution satellite datasets (such as CHIRPS and PERSIANN-CDR) to address the deficiency in station based rainfall records.

Their analysis in central Punjab showed a definite phase deviation, that is, the rainfall declined until 2001 and upward trends after 2002 with most of the rain occurring in the monsoon season.

It assess the difference in the seasons, and highlight the differences in the regions to help in predicting climates change, planning about agriculture, and governance of water [5]