The possible changes in precipitation of Syrian due to climate change are projected in this study. The symmetrical uncertainty (SU) and multi-criteria decision-analysis (MCDA) methods are used to identify the best general circulation models (GCMs) for precipitation projections. The effectiveness of four bias correction methods, linear scaling (LS), power transformation (PT), general quantile mapping (GEQM), and gamma quantile mapping (GAQM) is assessed in downscaling GCM simulated precipitation. A random forest (RF) model is performed to generate the multi model ensemble (MME) of precipitation projections for four representative concentration pathways (RCPs) 2.6, 4.5, 6.0, and 8.5. The results showed that the best suited GCMs for climate projection of Syria are HadGEM2-AO, CSIRO-Mk3-6-0, NorESM1-M, and CESM1-CAM5. The LS demonstrated the highest capability for precipitation downscaling. Annual changes in precipitation is projected to decrease by −30 to −85.2% for RCPs 4.5, 6.0, and 8.5, while by < 0.0 to −30% for RCP 2.6. The precipitation is projected to decrease in the entire country for RCP 6.0, while increase in some parts for other RCPs during wet season. The dry season of precipitation is simulated to decrease by −12 to −93%, which indicated a drier climate for the country in the future.

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Droughts are more damaging when they occur during crop growing season. This research assessed the spatial distribution of drought risks to crops in Bangladesh. Catastrophe theory-based weighting method was used to estimate drought hazard, exposure, and risk by avoiding potential human bias. Ten major crops, including eight different types of rice, wheat, and potato, were selected for evaluation of drought risk. Results showed that 32.4%, 27.2%, and 16.2% of land in Bangladesh is prone to extreme Kharif (May-October), Rabi (November-April), and pre-Kharif (March-May) droughts, respectively. Among the major crops, Hybrid Boro rice cultivated in 18.2% of the area is found to be highly vulnerable to droughts, which is followed by High Yield Varity (HYV) Boro (16.9%), Transplant Aman (16.4%), HYV Aman (14.1%), and Basic Aman (12.4%) rice. Hybrid Boro rice in 12 districts, different varieties of Aman rice in 10 districts, and HYV Boro rice in 9 districts, mostly located in the north and northwest of Bangladesh, are exposed to high risk of droughts. High frequency of droughts and use of more land for agriculture have made the region highly prone to droughts. The methodology adopted in this study can be utilized for unbiased estimation of drought risk in agriculture in order to adopt necessary risk reduction measures.

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Hydrological time series forecasting is one of the hot topics in the domain of statistical hydrology. Providing accurate forecasting can contribute to diverse applications for catchment sustainability and management. Dew point temperature (Tdew) is one of the complex hydrological processes that highly essential to be quantified accurately for several catchment activities such as crops, agriculture, and others. In this study, three types of models’ recursive strategy, direct strategy, and DirRec which is the combination of recursive and direct strategies were adopted to obtain h-steps ahead predictions of Tdew. Ten years monthly scale dataset of Tdew at two meteorological stations (Beach and Cavalier) located at the North Dakota, USA, were used for the modeling development. The performance of the considered models was compared with two benchmark models: autoregressive moving average (ARIMA) and exponential smoothing (ETS). Modeling results indicated that, compared with the benchmark models, the proposed methods gave good results for the multi-ahead forecasting. For instance, for Cavalier station, the root mean squared prediction errors obtained from the proposed and benchmark methods when the forecast horizon is 12 are as follows: recursive strategy (RMSPE = 3.731) direct strategy (RMSPE = 3.385), DirRec (RMSPE = 3.141), ARIMA (RMSPE = 12.957), and ETS (RMSPE = 27.479).