Historical trend and future projection of climate extremes over the southern slope of Himalayas

Uncontrolled human activities during the past few decades, specifically the burning of fossil fuels that release greenhouse gases have resulted in global warming and climate change. Climate change affects everyone and every region around the globe,but mountainous areas are particularly vulnerable because of their fragile topography, unique climate-sensitive ecosystems and dependency of billions of population on mountain resources. Due to the unique setup of the environment, warming in the mountainous areas, specifically the Himalayan region is expected more rapidly than the global average. Situating at the central part of the world’s largest and most complex mountain ranges, the Nepal Himalayas is not an exception;instead,the region is considered a climate change hotspot. The consequences of climate change around this region mainly include rapidly melting glaciers, formation and rapid expansion of glacier lakes, erratic rainfall, increasedfrequency and magnitude of extreme weather events, change in monsoon pattern, etc.

The historical data shows increasing precipitation in the monsoon season while precipitation is declining in dry seasons including winter. The downscaled and bias-corrected CMIP6 also consistently projects a similar pattern of precipitation in Nepal. The increasing precipitation in summer monsoon, particularly high-intensity events will bring more floods and landslides while the decreasing precipitation in dry seasons will create drought and forest fires over the region. We will present the different climate extreme indices to evaluate the impact of future climate for the Himalayan region.