Nepal is situated in Himalaya-Hindu Kush region and is regarded as one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change, as northern part of the country is extremely elevated above the mean sea level, and has glacier lakes upslope Mount Everest. It has been observed that the glacier are retreating and glacier lakes are forming rapidly over Himalayan region due to the melting of glaciers which in turn have a great threat of GLOFs as flash floods downstream. It is clearly documented that the increase of surface temperature over the elevated highlands, with ice caps and glaciers, is much higher than low-lying areas due to albedo effect of the land use. These phenomena might continue which may result in further increase in surface temperature with the irreversible and unprecedented climate change or global warming. In addition, Nepal is also highly vulnerable to flash floods associated with microburst, severe thunderstorms, active monsoon trough, etc. Frequency and intensity of these meteorological phenomena could also be increased in the future, with the projected climate change. Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre (ADPC) in collaboration with other technical partners has been implementing this project with financial assistance from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) for strengthening capacity of DHM for managing climate change risk for the country.

1) Data digitization, quality control, and statistical analysis

2) Generating gridded data set for observed climatological data

3) Dynamic downscaling of future climate projections

4) Climate data portal development

5) Capacity building of DHM officials

6) Workshops for dissemination of results and recommending follow up actions to stakeholders

The project was aimed at addressing several technical and capacity building aspects of DHM officials for better preparedness for providing wealth of information to the sector specific stakeholders to assess impacts and vulnerability of unprecedented climate change and developing suitable adaptation options for climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture & food security, water resources, energy, health, etc. This includes, digitizing observed meteorological data, generating gridded data sets, statistical analyses of observed data, downscaling of future climate projection, development of web portal for easy accessing climate information, training of DHM staff to cope up with similar nature of the work, etc. High resolution future climate scenarios would also help sector specific policy makers, planners for taking proactive adaptation measures in climate-sensitive sectors.

View 6. CCCRM : project no231 (limate Data Digitization and Downscaling of Climate Change Projections in Nepal (ADBCC)) in a larger map