wcm.01.2019.01.06

Pakistan is a developing country whose economy mainly depends on agriculture which is more susceptible to the effects of climate changes. Due to lack of modern technical resources, Pakistan does not have adequate monitoring systems for the prediction of likelihood of occurrence of extreme events, or the assessment of possible changes in weather patterns, thus making the task of developing short term response or disaster mitigation strategies extremely difficult. Pothohar is a plateau in north-eastern Pakistan, forming the northern part of Punjab including Attock, Chakwal, Jhehlum, Rawalpindi districts and Islamabad Territory. Pothohar region is a prominent region in Pakistan and consists of important districts. Its agriculture is entirely based on rainfall and no canals are available for the irrigation in this area. Farmers in this area are adversely affected by the changing climate and abrupt changes in rainfall. They need to know the changing patterns of rainfall to adopt new techniques and schedules for their agriculture to cope the changing climate. Four districts were selected to cover this region and rainfall and temperature data of these districts and Mann-Kendall method was used to detect the trends. After that, kriging was used for interpolating the data between the stations. Monthly precipitation trends were identified here to achieve the objective which has been shown in the data. There are rising rates of precipitation in some months and decreasing trends in some other months obtained by these statistical tests suggesting overall insignificant changes in the area. From the results it is clear that the majority of the trends in the annual, seasonal and monthly Tmax and Tmin time series showed increasing tendency during the last decades, while the increasing trends in the Tmin series were stronger than those in the Tmax series. The Tmax and Tmin warming trends were more obvious in summer and winter than in autumn and spring.