Summary Report on the AWCI Training Workshop on Climate Change Impact Assessment
Held in Islamabad, Pakistan, 15 – 17 September 2014
Organized by the Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) in cooperation with the University of Tokyo,
Japan and supported by the Asia Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN).
http://monsoon.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/AWCI/meetings/IslamabadTraining_Sep2014/index.htm

Background
The Asian Water Cycle Initiative (AWCI) has developed an advanced river management system, which isbased on integration of data from earth observation satellites and in-situ networks with other types of data,
including numerical weather prediction model outputs, climate model outputs, geographical information,and socio-economic data. The system has been successfully applied to a set of AWCI demonstration
basins showing a high potential for practical applications including assessment of climate change impacts
on watershed hydrological regimes and hence water resources availability in future.
While AWCI has always aimed at exploitation of available scientific knowledge and technology
advancement for addressing the societal needs in the arena of water resources, such efforts on bridging
the science at one side and decision making process and operational use at another side have become
even more critical now, when AWCI has entered its second phase. Negative consequences of natural
hazards are on the rise despite of scientific and technology advancements in relevant fields and thus it is
an imperative to implement activities that facilitates implementation of advanced technology and latest
scientific knowledge into praxis. This will contribute to building up a resilient society and achieving
sustainable development.
Accordingly, AWCI has been now pursuing operational applications of the developed system and, moregenerally, the established data integration approaches. This requires capacity building activities to assure
the system is understood by a large community of experts and practitioners. The planned Training
Workshop is one of these capacity building efforts and it is organized as part of the AWCI related project
funded by APN under the CAPaBLE programme, titled: “Impact of Climate Change on Glacier Melting
and Water Cycle Variability in Asian River Basins” and led by Dr. Ghulam Rasul, PMD. The Workshop is
designed for researchers and practitioners, who are working on assessments of climate change impacts
on water resources and also for those with interest in hydrological modeling in snow and glacier basins.
Objectives
The objectives of the Training Workshop included:

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Thematic lectures on Climate-Water-Food-Health Nexus and APN and AWCI related activities inPakistan.
Introduction, description and demonstration of capabilities of the Water and Energy Budget
Distributed Hydrological Model for Snow and glacier basins (WEB-DHM-S), which is a novel androbust tool for cold region hydrological applications.
In-depth explanation of the techniques for climate change impact assessment studies on water
resources that are built in the Data Integration and Analysis System (DIAS) and available on-line(demonstration version).
Explanation and Hands-on training on the use of these methods that include:
o selection of suitable GCM outputs for the region of interest,o rainfall bias correction of these outputs,
o downscaling of the GCM outputs for hydrological modeling at the basin scaleo hydrological runs by WEB-DHM (without the advanced snow and glacier component) –informative lecture on WEB-DHM will be provided but not full training of the model due to time
constraints,o analyses of the hydrological simulation results to assess possible impacts of climate change withfocus on high flows and floods, ando dynamical downscaling lectures.

Agenda (Final version)
DAY 1: Monday 15 September 201409:30 – 09:55 Registration
10:00 – 11:30 1. Opening and Welcome Remarks (Chair: TBD)
Mr. Hazrat Mir, Director General, Pakistan Meteorological Department: Welcome Address (10min)
Dr. Ghulam Rasul, PMD: APN Project led by PMD (10min)
Dr. Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, Special Envoy of WMO Secy Gen for Asia-Pacific (10min)
Dr. Amir Muhammad, APN Representative of Pakistan (10min)
Keynote Speech:
Prof. Dr. Toshio Koike, University of Tokyo, (30 min)Remarks by the Chief Guest: Iftikhar Ahmed Mir, Senior Joint Secretary (10min)
11:30 – 11:40 Group Photo
11:40 – 11:50

BREAK

11:50 – 12:00 2. Training Workshop Outline (Dr. Petra Koudelova, University of Tokyo)
12:00 – 12:30 3. Pakistani Contributions to AWCI (Chair: Dr. Arshad M. Khan)
20 minutes presentation and 5 min questions/answers
1. Pakistani activities under AWCI – overview of past, present, and future (Dr. Bashir Ahmad,
PARC)
12:30 – 14:00

LUNCH

14:00 – 14:50 3. Pakistani Contributions to AWCI – continue (Chair: Dr. Arshad M. Khan)
2. Indus project – climate and water nexus (Dr. Ghulam Rasul, PMD)
3. Indus project – water and food (agriculture) nexus (Prof. Dr. Ashfaq Chatta, University ofAgriculture, Faisalabad)14:50 – 16:15 4. Hydrological modeling in cold region watersheds (Chair: Prof. Dr. Ashfaq Ahmad
Chattha)20 minutes presentation and 5 min questions/answers
1. UNESCO Flood Project (Mr. Muhammad Riaz, FFD/PMD)
2. Distributed hydrologic modeling in cold region and high elevation watersheds in an integrated
approach (Dr. Maheswor Shrestha, UT)
3. Brief on September 2014 Floods in Pakistan (Mr. Aleem ul Hassan, National Weather
Forecasting Center)
16:15 – 16:45

BREAK

16:45 – 18:00 5. Data Integration and Analysis System (DIAS) and Data Support Services(Chair: Mr. Ahmad Kamal, NDMA);
20 minutes presentation and 5 min questions/answers
1. Expansion and Linkages of Water Cycle Initiative (Prof. Dr. Toshio Koike)
2. DIAS data upload, quality control and metadata support system (Dr. Petra Koudelova, UT)
3. CEOS Water Portal data service (Dr. Petra Koudelova, UT)
18:00

Adjourn

20:00 Discussion dinner

DAY 2: Tuesday 16 September 2014
Training Workshop on Climate Change Assessment: GCM Bias Correction and Statistical
Downscaling, Hydrological Analyses – using a demo case of the Soan Basin, Pakistan
08:00 – 08:30 Registration and Arrangements
08:30 – 12:00 6. Training Part 1.1: GCM Selection
08:30 – 08:50 Introductory Lecture (Dr. Petra Koudelova)
08:50 – 10:40 Hands-on: Selection of suitable GCM output for the Soan basin region – using an on-line
tool and MS Excel sheet (Dr. Petra Koudelova)
10:40 – 11:00

BREAK

11:00 – 12:00

Hands-on: Selection of suitable GCM output for the Soan basin region – using an on-line
tool and MS Excel sheet - continue

12:00 – 13:30

LUNCH

13:30 – 15:00 7. Training Part 1.2: GCM Rainfall Bias Correction, Statistical Downscaling
13:30 – 14:00 Introductory Lecture (Dr. Mohamed Rasmy)
14:00 – 15:00 Hands-on: Correction of the rainfall data of the selected GCMs and downscaling themusing an on-line tool; visual inspection and discussion (Dr. Mohamed Rasmy)
15:00 – 15:30

BREAK

15:30 – 17:30 8. Training Part 2: Hydrological Simulation Preparation and Analyses
15:30 – 16:00 Introductory Lecture (Dr. Asif M. Bhatti)
16:00 – 17:30 Hands-on: Preparing hydrological simulation, WEB-DHM demonstration, Analysis ofresults including high and low flows, Discussion (Dr. Asif M. Bhatti)
17:30

Adjourn and DinnerDAY 3: Wednesday 17 September 2014
Training Workshop on Climate Change Assessment: WEB-DHM-S, Dynamical Downscaling
08:00 – 08:30 Registration and Arrangements
08:30 – 09:30 9. Hydrological Modeling in Cold Regions: WEB-DHM-S model – physical andtechnical details, applicability discussion (Dr. Maheswor Shrestha)
09:30 – 12:00 10. Dynamical Downscaling (Dr. Mohamed Rasmy)
09:30 – 10:30 Methodology Introduction Lecture (Dr. Mohamed Rasmy)
10:30 – 10:50

BREAK

10:50 – 12:00

Case studies presentation, Discussion (Dr. Mohamed Rasmy)

12:00 – 12:30 11. Certificate Ceremony
12:30 – 13:00 12. Closing Remarks
13:00 – 14:00

LUNCH

14:00 – 17:00 EXCURSION
17:00 Adjourn

Workshop Report
The workshop has been planned and carried out to fulfill the objectives stated above. It included a plenary
lecture session on the Day 1, which was attended by a larger audience of more than 100 persons
consisting of experts from various sectors. The Day 2 and Day 3 were dedicated to a practical training of
smaller group of experts and researchers from the AWCI countries and PMD. The training took place atthe PMD computer lab, providing access to one PC to each of the participants.
This report provides summary of the given presentations and undertaken activities. The presentation files,
reference documents and photos of the event are available through the workshop website at:
http://monsoon.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/AWCI/meetings/IslamabadTraining_Sep2014/index.htm
Plenary Lecture Sessions on Day 1
Inaugural Session
The whole event was opened by Director General PMD, Mr. Hazrat Mir. In his welcome address, Mr. Mirhighlighted the importance of the workshop for expanding skills of invited researchers and experts from
Pakistan and other AWCI countries as well as raising awareness of the subject issues and targeted
techniques among broader community participating in the Plenary Sessions on Day 1. Mr. Mir alsomentioned the vulnerability of Pakistan to climate change impacts that are aggravated by other factors
like population growth and further aspects of global change. Extreme floods and droughts have been
affecting large number of people and causing enormous losses and thus the efforts like this workshop toutilize scientific and technological advancement to reduce such risks are highly valued. The APN projectfunding that made possible to organize this event was acknowledged.
The PMD project under the APN CAPaBLE program entitled “Impact of Climate Change on Glacier
Melting and Water Cycle Variability in Asian River Basins” was briefly introduced in the opening talk of Dr.
Ghulam Rasul, Chief Meteorologist PMD. The project has been planned and carried out under the AWCI
framework and included most of the AWCI participating countries. The project focused mainly on the cold
regions but also on drought phenomena and how these may be affected by climatic changes. The snowand glacier region of Himalayas-Karakorum-Hindukush plays a key role in the Pakistan water resources
and thus changes in this region affect the whole country. It is therefore very much needed to properly
assess the possible regime shifts in the snow and glacier processes in the region. The WEB-DHM-S
hydrological model is an advance tool that enables such assessment and thus its comprehensive
introduction was included into this workshop together with the training on climate model output bias
correction methods. In such arrangements, the training is valuable not only for the researchers from
Pakistan but also for all other AWCI countries dealing with the need to properly asses the impacts ofclimate change on water resources. The participation of the colleagues from other AWCI countries was
acknowledged and appreciated.
The third speaker of the inaugural session was Dr. Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, Special Envoy of WMO
Secy Gen for Asia-Pacific, who appreciated the good timing of such training event. The climate related
disasters have been coming into attention of policy makers, who have been now calling for more attention
to it and for increasing efforts to find adaptation solutions. Dr. Chaudhry mentioned that Pakistan has
already developed a comprehensive national policy framework for addressing the climate change related
issues but it is a high time for implementation of the adaptation measures and the current training
workshop is contributing to this implementation process. Dr. Chaudhry also emphasized the urgent needfor enhancing the regional collaboration relationships in terms of real-time, seamless hydrological data
sharing without which the efforts on establishing advanced and robust early warning system cannot be
fully successful.
The next opening talk was given by Dr. Amir Muhammad, APN Representative of Pakistan, who
expressed his appreciation of the APN project led by PMD, Dr. Rasul, and voiced that such training
workshops are very important and improved modeling skills in water resources fields are a high priority inthis region at these times. Pakistan’s economy highly depends on agriculture and meteorological andhydrological extremes are causing large damages to the agriculture production and thus significant
economic losses of the country. Accordingly, the hydrometeorology background as well as advanced
techniques for climate change impact assessment and early warning systems for floods and droughts
should not only be taught occasionally at specific events but should be introduced into the syllabus ofagriculture university programs.
The opening session also included a keynote lecture provided by Prof. Toshio Koike, University of Tokyo.
The lecture focused on the overarching theme of sustainable development and explained the key role ofwater cycle for this goal. Also, the importance of inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary approaches was
highlighted and Prof. Koike acknowledged participation of experts from various sectors in the event. He
emphasized the absolutely essential need of proper data and data archiving, managing, and sharing
capabilities that have been pursued and addressed by Global Earth Observation System of Systems(GEOSS) of the GEO framework. The regional initiative AWCI, which has also been involved in thecurrent PMD project, has been contributing to GEOSS since the AWCI inception in 2007. The AWCI
activities and accomplishments were demonstrated in a short movie that Prof. Koike included in his
lecture. Subsequently, Prof. Koike showed a number of examples on how the integration of various data(satellite, model output, in-situ observations) by using advanced modeling and visualization techniques,
had been used to resolve concrete issues under the AWCI framework. These examples are shown in his
presentation file available through the meeting website. It also includes the recent work on combining theflood or drought simulation/prediction models with socio-economy data and economy growth simulation
model that can assess impact of the disasters and at the same time impact of potential disasterprevention investment on future economy growth. Such tools are a great help in the process of building
resilience to global changes in our efforts aiming at sustainable development.
The last inaugural talk was provided by Mr. Iftikhar Ahmed Mir, Sr. Joint Secretary, Ministry of Defense,
Pakistan Government. Mr. Mir underlined the utmost importance of coordinated efforts in water resourcesmanagement under the effects of global changes and the urgent need of more effective and efficientutilization of advanced scientific knowledge and technologies for practical solution at local level. In thiscontext, Mr. Mir acknowledged the current training activity that as a commendable contribution to thisdesirable process that would lead to reduced risks of disasters associated with extreme situations offloods and droughts.

Session on Pakistani Contributions to AWCI
After the brief outline of the training workshop, three presentations on Pakistani involvement in AWCI
activities were given. In the first one, Dr. Bashir Ahmad, Pakistan Agriculture Research Center (PARC),
provided an overview of the long-term participation of Pakistan in the AWCI program that included
provision of a number of datasets to the publicly open DIAS archive, development of hydrological models
in the upper Indus basin and the Soan river basin, climate change impact assessment, participation inseveral training sessions and initiation of a broader project in the whole Indus basin. The most significant
contribution was proposing and realization of the current APN funded project under the leadership ofPMD. This presentation was followed by Dr. Ghulam Rasul, who introduced the water and climate nexus
perspectives of Pakistan, highlighting the need to implement effective adaptation measures that also
include continued efforts on society awareness raising, promotion of climate smart technologies (irrigation,change in cropping pattern, etc.), pursuing further comprehensive research into climate change andvariability impact on food security, and also understanding the roles and responsibilities of individual
sectors.
The third lecture in this session was provided by Prof. Ahmad Ashfaq Chattha, University of Agriculture,
Faisalabad, and focused on Water and Food/Agriculture nexus. The main constraint for crop production in
Pakistan is the water availability and thus the adaptation efforts in agriculture sector include research into
a possibility to increase production without increasing water consumption. This encompasses
development of a set of agronomic and other practices to improve crop water productivity, replacing
traditional crops with alternate, less water-demanding and more resilient varieties and introducing new
species suitable for the changed climate conditions. Intensive research is being carried out at the
Faisalabad University with promising results. What is needed is effective promotion of the new practices
among farmers and Prof. Chattha introduced several recent and ongoing projects addressing this issue.
Session on Hydrological modeling in cold region watersheds
The session was opened by the presentation on the UNCESCO Flood Project that developed operational
flood forecast system, flood hazard maps, and platforms for sharing hydrometeorological observations.
The flood forecast system was based on the IFAS model, provided by the International Centre for Water
Hazard and Risk Management under the auspices of UNESCO (ICHARM), and series of training sessions
were undertaken to assure the local professionals at PMD-FFD in Lahore can operate the systemsmoothly. At the time of the workshop, the test simulations were underway.
As the second contribution to the session, Dr. Maheswor Shrestha, University of Tokyo, gave acomprehensive lecture on distributed hydrological modeling in cold regions covering the physics ofnatural phenomena associated with snowing, snowmelt and glacier dynamics as well as main featuresand structure of the WEB-DHM-S hydrological model. At the end of his lecture, Dr. Shrestha showed
results of pilot applications of the model demonstrating its good performance. It was emphasized that thegood results can only be achieved if satisfactory input data is available, which is a key issue in cold
regions that are usually very remote and sparsely monitored. Therefore advance techniques for input data
bias correction (snowfall) were also developed and introduced during the lecture.
The last presentation of the session was provided by Dr. Aleem ul Hassan, National Weather Forecasting
Center, who informed the audience of the actual flood situation in Pakistan and relevant forecasts issues
by the Center preceding the flood situation. This presentation was an alternate contribution instead oforiginally scheduled talk on Disaster Management Plan of Pakistan, because Mr. Kamal, who was
supposed to provide this talk was preoccupied with the actual flood management operations. The outlook
on the seasonal and short term rainfall forecasts was very informative and showed rather high accuracyof the forecasts that were provided with sufficient time advance. This indicated that a severe flood could
be expected and if more efficient flood warning and disaster management systems were in place, thedisaster impact could be reduced. This conclusion only confirmed the urgent need for improving suchskills.

Session on Data Integration and Analysis System (DIAS) and Data Support Services
This session included three contributions focusing on the data archiving and data management systems
that are an indispensable basis for any advanced modeling and assessment tools. In the first talk, Prof.
Toshio Koike, University of Tokyo, introduced the so called Water Cycle Integrator (WCI) approach
towards solutions for climate change adaptations, integrated water resources management, agriculture
support, and river basin management. The WCI approach is based on a fact, that water is a key bridging
factor between climate processes and societal benefits and it is necessary to consider and integrate large
volume of disparate water-related data from various sources as well as information from other disciplines
including socio-economy sector. Such task requires a robust data archive with numerous built-in functions
and tools for data processing and a system of models and techniques to address various water cycle
phenomena and their interactions with other areas. The Data Integration and Analysis System (DIAS) of
Japan had been designed to fulfill these functions and its development had progressed to the beginningof operational phase. AWCI activities are closely linked with DIAS and Prof. Koike introduced AWCI casestudies that had been solved by utilizing DIAS capabilities and adopting the WCI approach.
The second presentation given by Dr. Petra Koudelova introduced the DIAS data upload, quality control
and metadata support system, which is a dedicated tool for in-situ data providers to maximally simplify
and facilitate the data submission procedure to the DIAS archive and subsequent data quality check andmetadata registration steps. The importance of such data procedures for their easy accessibility andreliable usability was emphasized. Potential data providers interested in the system were encouraged tocontact the DIAS team.
The last contribution introduced the Water Portal system developed by the JAXA RESTEC team and wasprovided by Dr. Koudelova on behalf of them. This so called distributed system provides access to dataarchived in remote data centers and complements it with various services. The JAXA RESTEC team had
prepared very informative overview of the system capabilities that were briefly demonstrated at thesession and the participants were encouraged to browse and try to use the system.
Practical Training Sessions on Day 2 and 3
The practical training sessions were held at the PMD computing lab, where each participant was provided
a PC and focused on the methods and techniques utilized for assessing the impact of climate change onhydrological regimes of a basin and thus on possible changes in water resources availability. The overall
methodology of climate change impact assessment on hydrological regime was reiterated, that is using
the climate projection model output for past and future periods as forcing data for a hydrological model toelucidate changes in the basin flows and soil moisture budgets. As the GCM output cannot be useddirectly to force basin scale hydrological models, several steps must be undertaken with the GCM output
to prepare a suitable input for the hydrological simulations. All these steps were explained using the said
techniques and these techniques were demonstrated on the Soan basin of Pakistan and all theparticipants focused on this basin in their individual work. The training included following sessions
focused on climate change impact assessment on water resources:
1. Selection of appropriate climate projection outputs by GCMs (CMIP3 datasets) for desired
assessment
2. GCM rainfall bias correction and statistical downscaling
3. Hydrological simulation preparation and analyses
4. Hydrological modeling in cold regions
5. Dynamical downscaling
The first session was led by Dr. Petra Koudelova and included a demonstration lecture with hands-on
practices. The DIAS based on-line tool for accessing, analyzing and downloading the CMIP3 datasets
was introduced, each participant followed the procedure individually. The step-by-step outline presented
at the session is available through the workshop website. Participants mastered the use of this on-line
tool for the purpose of selecting appropriate GCM output for a given region and completed thedemonstration task.
The second session, led by Dr. Mohamed Rasmy, explained the need of correcting the GCM precipitation
output for hydrological analyses at the local scale (basin scale) and introduced the dedicated function of

the said DIAS tool for statistical bias correction and downscaling of the GCM precipitation output.
Participants followed the procedure and mastered the use of this function.
The results of the previous steps were bias corrected precipitation datasets for the past (current climate)and future (future climate) periods. In the third session, led by Dr. Asif Mumtaz Bhatti, the preparation fora hydrological analysis by using the WEB-DHM hydrological model and the obtained corrected
precipitation data as forcing input was explained. More details of the WEB-DHM basis and physics were
provided and the procedure of a basin’s setting up and data preparation for simulation was explained.
The case of WEB-DHM application in the climate change impact assessment study in the Soan basin waspresented.
The fourth session was dedicated to the details of the WEB-DHM-S model, a hydrological model for coldand high altitude regions that is based on the WEB-DHM model and adds sophisticated snow and glacierprocess simulation components. The session was designed by Dr. Maheswor Shrestha, the developer of
WEB-DHM-S and provided an insightful lecture on the physics of the snow and glacier processes,
possibilities of their simulations and details of the snow and glacier components in WEB-DHM-S.
Examples of WEB-DHM-S applications were introduced including the upper Indus basin simulations.
At the last session, Dr. Mohamed Rasmy gave a comprehensive lecture on dynamical downscaling of the
GCM outputs for regional and local scales. Details of the methodologies were introduced for the case of
weather forecasts and for the case of climate projections. The weather forecast downscaling part included
explanation of model calibration, downscaling/nesting technique using the mesoscale WRF model, initialconditions and boundary conditions and their improvement, and data assimilation technique. In the
climate projection part, the so called Pseudo Global Warming Downscaling (PGW-DS) experiments wereintroduced.
The training workshop was summarized by Dr. Koudelova and an assignment for the participants wasintroduced that targeted the feedback from the audience on the provided training and their views of its
usefulness for their future work. The event was closed by the ceremonial awarding of participants with theCertificates of Accomplishment, handed out by Dr. Arif Mahmood, former Director General, PMD, Mr.
Hazrat Mir, Director General, PMD, and Dr. Ghulam Rasul, Chief Meteorologist, PMD.