Abstract
India, one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world, has suffered severe economic losses as well as life losses as per the World Focus report.1 More than 80% of its land and more than 50 million of its people are affected by weather disasters. Disaster mitigation necessitates reliable future predictions, which need focused climate change research. From the climate change perspective, the summer monsoon, the main lifeline of India, is predicted to change very adversely. The duration of the rainy season is going to shrink, and pre-monsoon drying can also occur. These future changes can impact the increase of vector-borne diseases, such as malaria, dengue, and others. In another recent study, 29 world experts from various institutions found that the largest exposure to disasters, such as tropical cyclones (TCs), river floods, droughts, and heat waves, is over India. For improved and skillful prediction, we suggest a three-stage cumulative method, namely, K is for observational analysis, U is for knowledge and understanding, and M is for modeling and prediction. In this brief note, we report our perspective of imminent weather disasters to India, namely, monsoons and TCs, and how the weather and climate forecasting can be improved, leading to better climate change adaptation.
Highlights
The Indian economy still significantly depends on agriculture, which, in turn, depends on the summer monsoon rains occurring from June to September
How do the conditions vary, during (i) pre-monsoon, (ii) monsoon depressions (MDs), and (iii) post-monsoon tropical cyclones (TCs)? Similar to Bony et al (2017), we suggest that more detailed observations of both satellite measurements and data developed in field programs should be used to understand the convection and circulation coupling of TCs over North Indian Ocean (NIO)
Similar to TCs, the lack of understanding of how convection and MD circulation couple hinders the prediction. For both TCs and MDs, we suggest analyzing time vertical sections of potential temperature, equivalent potential temperature, and saturated equivalent potential temperature such that one can get an idea of the relative importance of conditional instability of the second kind (CISK) or the quasi-equilibrium hypothesis discussed briefly above
Summary
The Indian economy still significantly depends on agriculture, which, in turn, depends on the summer monsoon rains occurring from June to September. In a recent detailed study with regional climate model projections, Ashfaq et al (2020) suggest that an important adverse signal of future climate change over the Indian monsoon region in the RCP8.5 scenario (Krishnan et al, 2020; Jyoteeshkumar Reddy et al, 2021) can occur. In a recent innovative study, 29 world experts (Lange et al, 2020) from different institutions and different countries, reached some important conclusions These inferences deserve urgent attention and action plans by policymakers. As per IPCC AR5, higher levels of coastal flooding due to TCs are expected to occur, all else assumed to be constant due to rising sea levels In this situation, together with the rise in sea level, the impact due to the strong TCs deteriorates the conditions of the increasing coastal population across India and the neighborhood. We focus on the TCs as well as summer monsoons, which are the two most relevant weather and climate phenomena for the Indian region
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