The Small Earth Nepal (SEN) along with the project collaborating institutions: Global Change Impact Studies Centre (GCISC), Pakistan, Centre of Environment and Geographic Information Services (GECIS), Bangladesh, Department of Environment (DoE), Bangladesh, Andhra University (AU), India and East West Center (EWC), USA, organized an inception workshop for the project ‘Runoff Scenario and Water Based Adaptation Strategies in South Asia’ which has been funded by the Asia Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN) under its ARCP Programme. The workshop was divided into two parts: sharing and feedback collection on the research approach and hands on training in climate and remote sensing data analysis. The workshop was attended by more than thirty national and international participants representing the collaborating institutions, national meteorological and hydrological services, academia and other research communities.
The formal opening session of the workshop was chaired by Dr Kedar Lal Shrestha, Ex-Vice Chancellor of Nepal Academy of Science and Technology (NAST) and President of Institute for Development and Innovation (IDI-Nepal). Dr Shrestha, in his remarks, quoted the situation of water, “when we need it, it is not there and when we don’t, its too much.” In the session, Mr. Sudarshan Rajbhandari, Vice President of SEN, welcomed all the participants and guests. Dr Madan Lall Shrestha, the project leader, shared the project objectives and its ultimate goals. Dr Shrestha further encouraged exploring adaptation measures as the output should be hooked up in the development process of the country. He insisted that the results should be streamlined in national context. Er. Gautam Rajkarnikar, Deputy Director General from Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM), the government of Nepal, wished the project team for the successful and implementable outcomes from the project which will be beneficial for the policy makers. Prof. Narendra Man Shakya from Institute of Engineering, Tribhuvan University addressed the session with his key note speech on the constraints of hydrological modeling in the steep and rugged topography of mountain countries like Nepal. Prof. Shakya shared that Regional Climate Model (RCM) outputs were not realistic and consistent to Himalayan region. Er. Waji Ullah from CEGIS, in his key remarks, emphasized on the challenges assessing the impacts and consequences of climate change in the South Asia region. Mr. Jeeban Panthi, project collaborator from SEN, presented the inception report for the feedback and suggestions. The participants suggested for using two approaches for hydrologic modeling: Soil and Water Assessment Tools (SWAT) and coupling of Snowmelt Runoff Modeling (SRM) with University of British Columbia (UBC) hydrologic model. Participants also suggested that the national policies and programmes like National Adaptation Programme of Action (NAPA), Climate Change Policies, and Water Resource Strategies etc. should be reviewed for developing the adaptation strategies.
Dr. Ailikun from Monsoon Asia Integrated Regional Study (MAIRS)/Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) shared about the climate data availability for South Asia. She shared that various remote sensing and gridded datasets like TRMM, APHRODITE and model data like CORDEX were available for South Asia, but special attention is to be given while using those datasets as they may not properly capture the weather parameters in the high altitudes. Dr. Tarendra Lakhankar from NOAA/City University of New York provided a lecture about the remote sensing application to hydrological modeling.
The hands on trainings organized during the workshop were GrADS and MODIS-MRT. The GrADS software (The Grid Analysis and Display System) which is an open source for analyzing the gridded datasets widely used in climate researches especially in modeling aspects and the MODIS-MRT tool was also introduced which is used for processing the remote sending (MODIS) snow cover datasets.
