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The production of precipitation in a regional climate model (RCM) is handled primarily by the microphysics and cumulus physics parameterizations. Application of the WRF model as an RCM to a midlatitude Japan case and tropical Philippine case using single-year simulation sensitivity experiment showed scheme sensitivity to simulation of precipitation and exploration of potential transferability of the schemes to different climate regime applications. Results show that simulations can capture seasonal 2-meter air temperature well and demonstrate capability in simulating seasonal precipitation for both application. Results show that cumulus (microphysics) scheme sensitivity is higher in simulating seasonal and monthly precipitation when larger fraction of precipitation is convective (non-convective). Precipitation sensitivity to cumulus scheme showed largest variation in warm season for Japan case and in all seasons in Philippine case. It has been found that Kain-Fritsch (KF) scheme tend to overestimate precipitation in hot humid climate regime application and Grell-3 (GR) scheme showed the most consistent good skill performance throughout the seasons for both applications. CU scheme selection showed higher impact for simulating precipitation in the model than the MP scheme selection.

Intensive and long-term rainfall in Myanmar causes floods and landslides that affect thousands of people every year. However, the rainfall observation network is still limited in number and extent, so satellite rainfall products have been shown to supplement observations over the ungauged areas. One example is the estimates from Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) called Integrated Multi-satellite Retrievals for GPM (IMERG), which has high spatial (0.1 × 0.1 degree) and temporal (30 min) resolution. This has potential to be used for modeling streamflow, early warnings, and forecasting systems. This study investigates the utility of these GPM satellite estimates for representing the daily rainfall for 25 rain gauges over Myanmar. Statistical metrics were used to understand the characteristic performance of the GPM satellite estimates. Daily rainfall estimates from GPM show a range of 29.3% to 81.1% probability of detection (POD). The satellite estimates show a capability of detecting no-rain days between 61.4 and 93.5%. For different rainfall intensities, the satellite estimates have a 12.9 to 39.1% POD for light rain (1–10 mm/day), 11.1 to 49% POD for moderate rain (10–50 mm/day), a maximum of 36% for heavy rain (50–150 mm/day), and a maximum of 12.5% for extreme rain (=150 mm/day). However, the correlation coefficient (CC) only ranges from 0.064 to 0.581, which is considered low, and is not uniform for all the stations. The highest CC scores and POD scores tend to be located in the northern part and deltaic region extending to the southern coasts in Myanmar, indicating a dependency of the statistical metrics on rainfall magnitude. The high POD scores indicate the utility of the estimates without correction for early warning purposes, but the estimates have low reliability for rainfall intensity. The satellite estimates can be used for forecasting and modeling purposes in the region, but the estimates require bias-correction before application.

Climate change affects both the temperature and precipitation, leading to changes in river runoff. The Bago River basin is one of the most important agricultural regions in the Ayeyarwady Delta of Myanmar, and this paper aims to evaluate the impact of climate change on it. Linear scaling was used as the bias-correction method for ten general circulation models (GCMs) participating in the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. Future climate scenarios are predicted for three 27-year periods: the near future (2020–2046), middle future (2047–2073), and far future (2074–2100) with a baseline period of (1981–2005) under two Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios: RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 of the IPCC Assessment Report 5 (AR5). The Hydrologic Engineering Center-Hydrologic Modeling System model is used to predict future discharge changes for the Bago River considering future average precipitation for all three future periods. Among the GCMs used to simulate meteorological data in the Ayeyarwady Delta zone, the Model for Interdisciplinary Research on Climate-Earth System is the most suitable. It predicts that average monthly precipitation will fluctuate and that average annual precipitation will increase. Both average monthly and annual temperatures are expected to increase at the end of the 21st century under RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios. The simulation shows that the Bago River discharge will increase for all three future periods under both scenarios.