We are planning to start complet study about climate change in Iraq, weather stations shows great variation of temperatures degrees during the last decades. My question about the basic steps to study climate change in Iraq, and which parame should measured in this study?
Please have a look at this useful ResearchGate link.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280097953_Evidence_of_Climate_Change_in_Iraq
Temperature is not the only effect of climate change. Rainfal will also change. However, although it will increase globally some regions will suffer less rainfall, such as the Middle East, e.g. Israel, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
collection and homogenization of long climatological series using:
- monthly averages of minimum and maximum temperatures;
- monthly totals of precipitation;
the choice of a monthly time step aims to anticipate problems of series homogeneity
.
Public health data could be considered also as valuable metrics in your study. For example, study the effects of vector borne disease like malaria as reflected by population size of these insects, versus the number of cases diagnosed and/or treated through the years. Water borne infections, human loss during heat waves. Also more metrics could derive from the agricultural sector and include crop yields and the effect of pathogens/parasites on crops and livestock because of climate change.
You might also wish to team up with agronomists in order to check evolving patterns of vegetation that will react to changes in water and temperature distributions through changes in distribution and yields, but also impact of pathogens and parasites.
Dear Dr Towe
The Degrees of temperature documented in weather stations offices located in Specific locations in Iraq and it’s controlled by government. Also I hear stories about weather changing from our old people and they assured the difference in comparison with last 40-50 years.
I think your should monitor any changes in the native vegetation cover by doing large scale megatransects every five year, because the native plant cover is the final arbiter in climate change for an area. See the vegetation megatransect I did for the Western USA mile-by-mile in 1997 at http://www.ecoseeds.com/megatransect.html>
Us humans can argue the fine points of climate change, is it really happening?, or does one degree increase make any difference?, or is there locally even one degree or another happening? However, the perennial native vegetation of an area,can tell us the unbiased story, by monitoring any changes therein.
If your native vegetation is shifting from one type, say from conifer forest to oak woodlands, or from oak woodlands to grasslands, or from perennial natives grasslands to desert, then a climate change is occurring in that country within that biome, because those biomes have been stable for centuries to thousands of years.
Another project you could do, is to complete all of the photos for Iran for the Confluence.Org project at You can then use those photo to get a view of the native vegetation on a country-wide scale, like I have at
That is why I am suggesting monitoring the native vegetation biomes to indicate climate change or global warming, and for biomes that are changing rapidly now, when they were stable for hundreds of years in the past, that might be our best indicators of climate change, rather than this continual arguments over weather records.
The biomes themselves are recording the climate change, when they shift radically from oak woodland to grasslands, when they were stable oak woodlands for centuries.
Or from grasslands to desert, or from conifer forests to oak woodlands. Each of those vegetation biomes require a very stable and narrow ranges of annual weather patterns, to remain stable for centuries.
The following links are useful to understand the basic parameters for studying the climate change:
Climate change: Which parameters are most important?
https://www.nordgen.org/ngdoc/forest/Konferanser/2015/Nordic-Baltic_Forest_Conference_2015/Madsen_Climate%20change%20-%20which%20climate%20parameters%20are%20most%20important.pdf
Climate Measurement: A review of rainfall and temperature measurement standards in Guyana
https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/documents/iaao/OdessaShako.pdf
Measuring Climate Change
http://www.global-greenhouse-warming.com/measuring-climate-change.html
What are the parameters to be use to assess the menace of climatic change ?
https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_are_the_parameters_to_be_use_to_assess_the_menace_of_climatic_change
Regards
Questionnaire survey among old farmers will be fruitful. They have always wonderful information about the change in crop pattern.
Dear Dr. Mitra,
As a palynologist I believe that interpreting past vegetation through pollen analysis offers a good form of palaeoclimatic reconstruction. Best-Khadijeh
Dear Dr. Mitra,
As a polynologist I believe that interpreting past vegetation through pollen analysis offers a form of palaeoclimatic reconstruction. Best-Khadijeh
Dear Dr. Mitra,
As a palynologist I believe that interpreting past vegetation through pollen analysis offers a form of palaeoclimatic reconstruction. Best-Khadijeh
Also, you can look at phytoliths left by native grasses that used to grow in areas that look currently like barren deserts.
The phytoliths are microscopic silica bodies that grass plants produce in their leaves, and you can usually identify the grass to genus by their shapes, of what formerly grew there. I am going to guess that most of the "desert" areas of Iran and Iraq was produced by domesticated animals within historic times, like the changes we made here in the USA in less than 100 years that you can see at http://www.ecoseeds.com/desertgrass.html
The change from solid perennial native grasslands and savannah to barren desert, can produce profound effects in the climate, as you can see in the two pictures at http://www.ecoseeds.com/cool.html - where the native vegetation still exists and where it is now gone.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Geoscience
- Atmospheric Sciences
- Climate Science
- Climate Change