Human activities have been implicated in the observed increase in Global Mean Surface Temperature. Over regional scales where climatic changes determine societal impacts and drive adaptation related decisions, detection and attribution (D&A) of climate change can be challenging due to the greater contribution of internal variability, greater uncertainty in regionally important forcings, greater errors in climate models, and larger observational uncertainty in many regions of the world. We examine the causes of annual and seasonal surface air temperature (TAS) changes over sub-regions (based on a demarcation of homogeneous temperature zones) of India using two observational datasets together with results from a multimodel archive of forced and unforced simulations. Our D&A analysis examines sensitivity of the results to a variety of optimal fingerprint methods and temporal-averaging choices. We can robustly attribute TAS changes over India between 1956–2005 to anthropogenic forcing mostly by greenhouse gases and partially offset by other anthropogenic forcings including aerosols and land use land cover change.
Numerous studies have shown significant changes in observed temperature and rainfall over the Indian subcontinent during the twentieth century. Kothawale and Rupa Kumar (2005) quantified the increasing trend in annual mean temperature over the Indian region by 0.05°C/decade during the period 1901-2003. Attri and Tyagi (2010 found that the annual mean temperature of Indian region has risen at a similar average rate, by 0.56°C during the 1901-2009 period. Srivastava et al. (2017) report that the annual mean, maximum and minimum temperatures of India have increased significantly during the period 1901-2010 by about 0.6, 1.0, and 0.18°C per century, respectively. They showed an accelerated warming trend in maximum and minimum temperature during the 1981-2010 period, and this warming trend is particularly seen over the central, northern, and eastern/northeastern parts of the country. Using the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 (CMIP5; Taylor et al., 2012) model archive, Sonali and Nagesh Kumar (2016) analyzed changes in maximum and minimum temperatures and detected a significant change in observed minimum temperatures over India but could not attribute it to specific forcings.Many detection and attribution (D&A) analyses of surface air temperature (TAS) changes have been performed at global and continental scales (
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