Global changes, regional impacts : climate change in the Middle East

Abstract. In the Middle East, an area where pressure on water resources is intensified by political conflict and natural scarcity, the possibility of future climate change looms as yet another compounding factor. An integrated approach, taking economic, social, political and climate factors into consideration, is embodied in the CLIMSOC model. Before using global model data for a future period as input into the regional scale CLIMSOC model, the global climate model data must first be tested for the present period. The work summarised here examines monthly preeipitation data from a Hadley Centre Global Climate Model, comparing it to an observed climatology, for the present period 1961–1990. The differences between the GCM and observed data are examined with an eye toward systematic discrepancies among the different months, spatial patterns and overall quantitative differences in preeipitation. Finally, a glimpse at future preeipitation, as estimated by the global climate model, is presented in the context of the comparison results.