Climate change and spatio-temporal trend analysis of climate extremes in the homogeneous climatic zones of Pakistan during 1962-2019

4.2. Climate change and extremes’ analysis in HKH region (Present climatic status of Karakoram Anomaly) The widely known Karakoram anomaly was investigated to see its present status by utilizing the updated observed meteorological data from the North of Pakistan as shown in Table 1. The stations are located between an altitude of 1,250 m a.s.l. at Chilas and 2,317 m a.s.l. at Skardu station. The data was analyzed seasonally to assess the contemporary climate change. The average temperature has an interesting pattern, specifically in winter (DJF), a significant increase at high altitude station (Skardu) of 0.97 and a significant decrease at the lowest station (Chilas) of –0.56 given in Table 4. Almost similar pattern is observed during MAM with the maximum increase at Astore and decrease at Chilas station. During JJA, average temperature decreased at all meteorological stations. Maximum and minimum decrease in the average tem- perature is noted at Gopis (with the magnitude of -1.42˚C) and Darosh (with magnitude of -0.01˚C), respectively. These changes are highly significant except at Chilas meteorological sta- tion. In SON, the average temperature has an increasing trend at all stations other than Bunji, Chilas and Gopis with decreasing trend. Table 5 shows the seasonal trends in precipitation, maximum, and minimum tempera- ture during 1962–1990. During DJF, precipitation has significantly increasing trend except Gopis where the trend is significantly decreasing. Maximum and minimum tem- perature results show significantly decreasing trend during JJA except Astore with an

insignificant decrease in maximum temperature. These results are in line with Karakoram Anomaly during the 1962–1990. Table 6–8 show seasonal trend analysis for precipitation, maximum temperature and minimum temperature during 1991–1999, 2000–2009 and Fig 9. Probability density function of Consecutive dry days (CDD) for the duration of 1991–2019 and 1962–1990 in each climate zone. Green and red color represent 1962–1990 and 1991–2019, respectively. On x-axis the number of days and on y-axis the density of CDD is given. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0271626.g009 PLOS ONE Climate change and extremes analysis using observed data (1962-2019) over Pakistan PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0271626 July 27, 2022 15 / 27