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

zone and for each station in the HKH region. Moreover, the results of this study may help to address some of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nation Develop- ment Programme (UNDP) related to climate action, water, hunger and environment. The remaining paper is structured as: section 2 is for study area and data; section 3 presents the methodology; section 4 consists of results; section 5 is reserved for discussion and section 6 presents conclusions about this study. 2. Study area and data The target location of this study is Pakistan which has 881,913 square kilometers area and approximately 222 million inhabitants [49–51]. Pakistan lies in the northern hemisphere with latitude of 23.4–37.3N and longitude of 60.5–78.5E. It has a diversity in climate as it has Arabian Sea in the south and the world’s highest mountains (Himalaya, Hindukush and Karakoram) in the north. The country has four climate seasons (Winter = December-February (DJF), Spring = March-May (MAM), Summer = June-August (JJA), Autumn = September-November (SON)) and consequently significant spatial and temporal variation in the climate. In Fig 1, zone 1 comprises cold regions include northern and central-western parts of the country. Zone 2 comprised of Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT), some parts of Azad-Jammu and Kashmir and Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa which is part of the monsoon dominated region and receive Fig 1. Five homogeneous climate zones of Pakistan. We used open access SRTM data to generate Fig 1, there is no copyright restrictions to use

the data. Source: NASA Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) (2013). Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) Global. Distributed by OpenTopography. https://doi.org/10.5069/G9445JDF. Accessed: 2022-04-09. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0271626.g001 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 4 / 27