The Past and Future Variability of Indian Monsoon Hydroclimate and its Extremes – Understanding and Modeling

Indian monsoonal hydroclimate and its extremes exhibit significant variability at temporal (daily, seasonal, interannual, decadal and millennial) and spatial scales. This variability and vagaries inflict destructive punches to the larger socio-economy of the country, besides taking many human lives. The variability is increasing in their intensity and likely exacerbated by the warming world. The recent line of extreme events (e.g., floods in Chennai, Pakistan, Kerala) underscores this. In a globalised world this impact is felt around the world. To effectively mitigate the negative impacts of hydroclimate extreme events, we need to understand and model their space-time variability along with their attendant uncertainties. For, this will enable risk-based management, planning and adaptation for a range of sectors – infrastructure, water resources, public health, agriculture etc.

An overview of this variability and their drivers in the past, present and in the future will be presented. Future projections from climate models will also be placed in the current and historical context. Then will focus on (i) Diagnosing and understanding the orchestration of the hydroclimate extremes and (ii) Novel Bayesian Hierarchical Modeling (BHM) approaches for space-time extremes of precipitation and daily and seasonal flow extremes on a River Basin network. The potential extensions of these approaches for downscaling global climate models, and to other extremes such as droughts, precipitation, and temperature spells, etc., will be readily apparent.

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