Unveiling climate change‐induced temperature‐based hotspots across India through multimodel future analysis from CMIP6

Abstract

AbstractGlobal warming and associated climate change impacts have posed major threats to this 21st century's world, especially for developing countries like India, given various socio‐economic factors. Considering the extensive spatial diversity of this warming‐induced climate changes, suitable region‐specific strategies must be adopted to combat its potential implications. Therefore, it becomes crucial to identify the places most exposed to this changing scenario. This study attempts to shed some light towards this by identifying futuristic “temperature‐based hotspots” across India through a comprehensive multimodel multiscenario analysis at various spatiotemporal scales. A new and more informative index named “Temperature‐based Hotspot Index (THIn)” is proposed for this purpose, which encapsulates various attributes of changing temperature, including its mean, variability and extremes (magnitude, frequency and severity) into a single metric. Bias‐corrected future‐projected temperature data from 14 state‐of‐the‐art general circulation models (GCMs) have been considered for the analysis, which are participating in the coupled model intercomparison project version 6 (CMIP6). The overall analysis identifies temperature‐based hotspots to span predominantly in the west, north and northeast parts of the country. On the other hand, the southern and eastern part of India along the eastern coast are found to be comparatively less exposed to temperature changes in future. Overall, we expect the findings of this study to be beneficial to plan and adopt suitable region‐specific management strategies to combat the challenging future in sufficient advance.