water Article Long-Term Perspective Changes in Crop Irrigation Requirement Caused by Climate and Agriculture Land Use Changes in Rechna Doab, Pakistan 1,2, 3, 1, 2,4 Arfan Arshad y , Zhijie Zhang y, Wanchang Zhang * and Ishfaq Gujree 1 Key Laboratory of Digital Earth Science, Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China 2 University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China 3 Department of Geography, Center for Environmental Sciences and Engineering (CESE), University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269-4148, USA 4 Institute of Tibetan Pleatue Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +86-10-82178131 The first two authors contributed equally to this work and should be considered as co-first authors of y this paper. Received: 2 July 2019; Accepted: 24 July 2019; Published: 29 July 2019 Abstract: Climate change and agriculture land use changes in the form of cropping patterns are closely linked with crop water use. In this study the SDSM (statistical downscaling model) was used to downscale and simulate changes in meteorological parameters from 1961 to 2099 using HadCM3 General Circulation Model (GCM) data under two selected scenarios i.e., H3A2 and H3B2. Results indicated that Tmax,Tmin, and wind speed may increase while relative humidity and precipitation may decrease in the future under both H3A2 and H3B2 scenarios. Downscaled meteorological parameters were used as input in the CROPWAT model to simulate crop irrigation requirement (CIR) in the baseline (1961–1990) and the future (2020s, 2050s and 2080s). Data related to agriculture crop sown area of five major crops were collected from Punjab statistical reports for the period of 1981–2015 and forecasted using linear exponential smoothing based on the historical rate.