Long Term Effect of Climate Change on Rainfall in Northwest Iraq

Middle East and North Africa are considered as arid to semi-arid region. Water shortages in this region, represents an extremely important factor in the stability of the region and an integral element in its economic development and prosperity. Iraq was an exception due to the presence of Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. After the 1970s the situation began to deteriorate due to continuous decrease of the discharges of these rivers which are expected to dry (2040) with global climate change. In this research, long rainfall trends up to the year 2099 were studied in Sinjar area, northwest of Iraq to give an idea about future prospects. Two emission scenarios used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (A2 & B2) were employed to study long term rainfall trends in northwest of Iraq. ANN model was used to provide climate change information at a suitable spatial scale from the Global Climate Model (GCM) data. In general 7 predictors of climate variables were found to have a significant relation with the rainfall for winter, spring and 6 predictors for autumn while the summer shows only 4 predictors. All seasons consistently projected a drop in daily rainfall for all future periods with summer which expected to have more reduction compared with other seasons as it is consider to be almost dry by end of 21 century for both scenarios. The results also indicates that, there is an appreciable change in the number of wet days by 2080s for months January, February and March in both scenarios with about 10%-40% decrease in wet days, while rest of the months experience a slight drop for all future periods. Summer months are noticed are considered almost dry, however, a tendency of dryness extending to September is also observed. Generally the average rainfall trend shows a continuous decrease. The overall average annual rainfall is slightly above 210 mm. In view of this prudent water management strategies are to be adopted to overcome water shortage crisis