*4.1. Temperature Predictions*

GCMs have widely been used for predicting future temperature trends. Van Vuuren et al. [29] showed that the mean temperature was likely to increase in the future in many parts of the world. For instance, Basheer et al. [30] claimed that the climate over the Dinder River Basin would be warmer in the upcoming decades. Majhi and Pattnayak [31] also revealed that there would be a gradual temperature increase in Nabarangpur district at the end of the 21st century. Our results also

indicated that the temperature would generally increase in the three investigated periods; however, the magnitude of these increases are dependent on the scenarios applied. The CanESM2 scenarios postulated a higher variability in the predicted temperature values than the HadCM3 scenarios. In addition, the temperature changes predicted by CanESM2 were noticeably higher than those predicted by HadCM3. Such different trends have also been observed by [22], who compared some GCMs such as HadCM3 and CanESM2. These diverse trends could have been due to the different scenarios used, as was the case for the study of [32]. Among the CanESM2 scenarios, rcp8.5 and rcp4.5 predicted the highest temperature values, respectively, whilst rcp2.6 projected the lowest ones. These results are in line with the findings of [22]. The greatest temperature values predicted by scenarios rcp8.5 and rcp4.5 seem plausible due to the underlying physical laws to simulate the ongoing increases in the radiative forcing and CO2 concentrations by the end of the 21st century. In contrast, rcp2.6 simulated a lower radiative forcing towards the end of the 21st century as well as lower CO2 concentrations.
