Climate change impacts on hydrometeorological variables using a bias correction method: The lake Karla watershed case

Abstract

This paper is dealing with the assessment of climate change scenarios on selected meteorological variables at the Lake Karla watershed, central Greece and it is a contribution to the “HYDROMENTOR†research project. A statistical downscaling method has been employed to estimate monthly precipitation and temperature time series for future climate periods. The outputs of the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling Analysis Global Circulation Model CGCM3 were applied for three socioeconomic scenarios, namely SRES B1, SRES A1B and SRES A2 for the assessment of climate change impact on precipitation and temperature. The methodology has been developed for the historical period 1980-2000 and applied for two future periods 2030–2050 and 2080–2100. Historical and future periods were compared for monthly and annual basis using various statistical criteria such as the mean and standard deviation. Results showed that climate change will have minor impacts on precipitation and even smaller impacts on temperature.