Simulation of Future Daily Rainfall Scenario using Stochastic Rainfall Generator for a Rice-Growing Irrigation Scheme in Malaysia

Authors

  • N. S. Dlamini Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM)
  • M. K. Rowshon
  • Ujjwal Saha
  • S. H. Lai
  • A. Fikri
  • J. Zubaidi

Keywords:

Keywords¬— Daily rainfall, Rainfall generator, Irrigation demand, GCMs, Paddy

Abstract

Rainfall is an important component in paddy water demand model for determining daily irrigation requirements. Knowledge of how it is likely to evolve in future is therefore indispensable for paddy farming. This paper presents a quantitative assessment of the possible changes in future rainfall performed by downscaling GCM simulations for the Tanjung Karang irrigation scheme in Malaysia. The stochastic rainfall generator model (WGEN), never applied in Malaysia before, was adopted for downscaling and simulation of future daily rainfall using 16 simulations developed from 10 GCMs driven by the latest Representative Concentration Pathways scenarios (RCPs), 6.0 and 8.5 for two future periods (2030s and 2060s).  Change factors were computed from the GCMs using the delta change method which were used in perturbing model parameters for future simulation of rainfall. The results obtained show a wide spread among GCMs, although they all agree in the direction of future rainfall changes. Overall annual rainfall is predicted to increase by 6% and 14% for dry and wet seasons, respectively under RCP6.0 and 8.5 scenarios. Additionally, seasonal effective rainfall projections show a decreasing change of 5% during dry season under RCP6.0, while an increase change of 8 to 13% is predicted in wet season from moderate (RCP6.0) to the most severe (RCP8.5) scenarios respectively. This is an area of concern that farmers and water managers may need to keep alert so as to secure future paddy irrigation water. The projected changes in rainfall regime require further work before concluding whether these changes have negative or positive consequences for the paddy sector. The stochastic model will be adopted as a component in a future study aimed at developing a water management-support tool for modeling water allocations and irrigation schedules in paddy fields.

Author Biography

  • N. S. Dlamini, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM)
    Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering

References

R. Matthews, M. Kropff, T. Horie, and D. Bachelet, "Simulating the impact of climate change on rice production in Asia and evaluating options for adaptation," Agricultural systems, vol. 54, pp. 399-425, 1997.

T. S. Lee, M. A. Haque, and M. Najim, "Scheduling the cropping calendar in wet-seeded rice schemes in Malaysia," Agricultural water management, vol. 71, pp. 71-84, 2005.

IPCC, "Emission Scenarios: A Special Report of IPCC Working Group III," Cambridge Univ. Press, New York., 2000.

B. Bates, "Climate Change and Water: Technical Paper of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [7.11 MB]," IPCC Secretariat: Geneva, 2008.

DID, "Detailed Study of Water Resources Availability for Northwest Selangor Integrated Agricultural Development Project. Department of Irrigation and Drainage, Kuala Lumpur Office, Malaysia.," 1996.

Y. B. Dibike and P. Coulibaly, "Hydrologic impact of climate change in the Saguenay watershed: comparison of downscaling methods and hydrologic models," Journal of hydrology, vol. 307, pp. 145-163, 2005.

P. Prodanovic and S. P. Simonovic, Development of rainfall intensity duration frequency curves for the City of London under the changing climate: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of Western Ontario, 2007.

R. Jones, J. Murphy, and M. Noguer, "Simulation of climate change over europe using a nested regionalâ€climate model. I: Assessment of control climate, including sensitivity to location of lateral boundaries," Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, vol. 121, pp. 1413-1449, 1995.

S. Ghosh and P. Mujumdar, "Nonparametric methods for modeling GCM and scenario uncertainty in drought assessment," Water Resources Research, vol. 43, 2007.

R. L. Wilby, H. Hassan, and K. Hanaki, "Statistical downscaling of hydrometeorological variables using general circulation model output," Journal of Hydrology, vol. 205, pp. 1-19, 1998.

C.-y. Xu, "Climate change and hydrologic models: A review of existing gaps and recent research developments," Water Resources Management, vol. 13, pp. 369-382, 1999.

L. Mearns, F. Giorgi, P. Whetton, D. Pabon, M. Hulme, and M. Lal, "Guidelines for use of climate scenarios developed from regional climate model experiments," 2003.

R. Wilby, S. Charles, E. Zorita, B. Timbal, P. Whetton, and L. Mearns, "Guidelines for use of climate scenarios developed from statistical downscaling methods," 2004.

H. Fowler, S. Blenkinsop, and C. Tebaldi, "Linking climate change modelling to impacts studies: recent advances in downscaling techniques for hydrological modelling," International journal of climatology, vol. 27, pp. 1547-1578, 2007.

A. Caron, R. Leconte, and F. Brissette, "An improved stochastic weather generator for hydrological impact studies," Canadian Water Resources Journal, vol. 33, pp. 233-256, 2008.

S. J. Riha, D. S. Wilks, and P. Simoens, "Impact of temperature and precipitation variability on crop model predictions," Climatic Change, vol. 32, pp. 293-311, 1996.

A. Hartkamp, J. White, and G. Hoogenboom, "Comparison of three weather generators for crop modeling: a case study for subtropical environments," Agricultural Systems, vol. 76, pp. 539-560, 2003.

D. S. Wilks, "Adapting stochastic weather generation algorithms for climate change studies," Climatic change, vol. 22, pp. 67-84, 1992.

C. W. Richardson, "Stochastic simulation of daily precipitation, temperature, and solar radiation," Water Resources Research, vol. 17, pp. 182-190, 1981.

C. W. Richardson and D. A. Wright, WGEN: A model for generating daily weather variables: US Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service Washington, DC, USA, 1984.

M. A. Semenov and E. M. Barrow, "Use of a stochastic weather generator in the development of climate change scenarios," Climatic change, vol. 35, pp. 397-414, 1997.

D. S. Wilks and R. L. Wilby, "The weather generation game: a review of stochastic weather models," Progress in Physical Geography, vol. 23, pp. 329-357, 1999.

S. M. Deni, A. A. Jemain, and K. Ibrahim, "The best probability models for dry and wet spells in Peninsular Malaysia during monsoon seasons," International Journal of Climatology, vol. 30, pp. 1194-1205, 2010.

W. Z. W. Zin, S. Jamaludin, S. M. Deni, and A. A. Jemain, "Recent changes in extreme rainfall events in Peninsular Malaysia: 1971–2005," Theoretical and applied climatology, vol. 99, pp. 303-314, 2010.

F. Yusof, F. Hui-Mean, J. Suhaila, Z. Yusop, and K. Ching-Yee, "Rainfall characterisation by application of standardised precipitation index (SPI) in Peninsular Malaysia," Theoretical and applied climatology, vol. 115, pp. 503-516, 2014.

S. M. Deni, A. Jemain, and K. Ibrahim, "The spatial distribution of wet and dry spells over Peninsular Malaysia," Theoretical and applied climatology, vol. 94, pp. 163-173, 2008.

NAHRIM, "Impacts of Climate Change on Hydrologic Regimes, Water Resources and Landuse Change for Sabah and Sarawak. Research report.," 2011.

G. Wayne, "The beginner’s guide to representative concentration pathways. Skeptical Science," ed, 2013.

M. Rowshon, M. Mojid, M. Amin, M. Azwan, and A. Yazid, "Improving Irrigation Water Delivery Performance of a Large-Scale Rice Irrigation Scheme," Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering, vol. 140, 2014.

B. Fu, W. Zhao, L. Chen, Q. Zhang, Y. Lü, H. Gulinck, et al., "Assessment of soil erosion at large watershed scale using RUSLE and GIS: a case study in the Loess Plateau of China," Land degradation & development, vol. 16, pp. 73-85, 2005.

S. Jamaludin and A. A. Jemain, "Fitting the statistical distributions to the daily rainfall amount in peninsular Malaysia," Jurnal Teknologi, vol. 46, pp. 33-48, 2007.

F. Yusof, L. M. Yung, and Z. Yusop, "Tropical daily rainfall amount modelling using Markov Chain-Mixed Exponential (MCME)," Jurnal Teknologi, vol. 74, 2015.

C. T. Haan, "Statistical methods in hydrology," 1977.

Y. Chen, X. Chen, C.-Y. Xu, and Q. Shao, "Downscaling of daily precipitation with a stochastic weather generator for the subtropical region in South China," Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Discussions Discussions, vol. 3, pp. 1145-1183, 2006.

M. Z. Hashmi, A. Y. Shamseldin, and B. W. Melville, "Comparison of SDSM and LARS-WG for simulation and downscaling of extreme precipitation events in a watershed," Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment, vol. 25, pp. 475-484, 2011.

C. Prudhomme, N. Reynard, and S. Crooks, "Downscaling of global climate models for flood frequency analysis: where are we now?," Hydrological processes, vol. 16, pp. 1137-1150, 2002.

C. Kilsby, P. Jones, A. Burton, A. Ford, H. Fowler, C. Harpham, et al., "A daily weather generator for use in climate change studies," Environmental Modelling & Software, vol. 22, pp. 1705-1719, 2007.

S. Fatichi, V. Y. Ivanov, and E. Caporali, "Simulation of future climate scenarios with a weather generator," Advances in Water Resources, vol. 34, pp. 448-467, 2011.

M. New and M. Hulme, "Representing uncertainty in climate change scenarios: a Monte-Carlo approach," Integrated Assessment, vol. 1, pp. 203-213, 2000.

A. W. Wood, L. R. Leung, V. Sridhar, and D. Lettenmaier, "Hydrologic implications of dynamical and statistical approaches to downscaling climate model outputs," Climatic change, vol. 62, pp. 189-216, 2004.

X.-C. Zhang, "Spatial downscaling of global climate model output for site-specific assessment of crop production and soil erosion," Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, vol. 135, pp. 215-229, 2005.

R. G. Allen, L. S. Pereira, D. Raes, and M. Smith, "Crop evapotranspiration-Guidelines for computing crop water requirements-FAO Irrigation and drainage paper 56," FAO, Rome, vol. 300, 1998.

K. S. Low, " Water resources assessment on the Tanjung Karang Irrigation Scheme. Report of the Department of Irrigation and Drainage.," 1984.

D. Hughes, D. Kingston, and M. Todd, "Uncertainty in water resources availability in the Okavango River basin as a result of climate change," Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, vol. 15, pp. 931-941, 2011.

Z. Hassan and S. Harun, "Application of statistical downscaling model for long lead rainfall prediction in Kurau River catchment of Malaysia," Malaysian Journal of Civil Engineering (MJCE), vol. 24, pp. 1-12, 2012.

R. Kabiri, V. Ramani Bai, and A. Chan, "Regional precipitation scenarios using a spatial statistical downscaling approach for Klang watershed, Malaysia," Journal of Environmental Research And Development Vol, vol. 8, 2013.

Downloads

Published

2015-10-26

How to Cite

Simulation of Future Daily Rainfall Scenario using Stochastic Rainfall Generator for a Rice-Growing Irrigation Scheme in Malaysia. (2015). Asian Journal of Applied Sciences, 3(5). https://ajouronline.com/index.php/AJAS/article/view/3183

Similar Articles

21-30 of 984

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.