This tool provides access to climate change information easily and intuitively and enables the user to visualize the impacts of climate change on the Indus River basin and its sub-basins. The purpose is to disseminate recent climate products generated by ICIMOD with partners and to communicate present conditions and future climate scenarios based on current scientific understanding. The tool can also be used to compare the climate information for different models, time periods and scenarios. The tool also allows the user to download the dataset used for the analysis.

It uses 8 (4 each for Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) 4.5 and 8.5) Global Circulation Model (GCM) run from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) datasets of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). Future scenarios in climate are presented for the mid-century (2036–2065) and end century (2071–2100) with respect to the reference period 1981–2010 for precipitation and temperature.

The reference climate data was developed by Lutz and Immerzeel (2015) for the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra basins. The climate dataset is developed from Watch Forcing ERA-Interim (WFDEI) dataset (Weedon et al. 2014) and was further bias corrected using the GPCC dataset (Schneider et al. 2013) and glacier mass balance data (Immerzeel et al. 2015, 2012).