Future projections of seasonal temperature and precipitation for India

Abstract

Ninety climate models, from four consortiums—CMIP5, CMIP6, NEX-GDDP, and CORDEX—are evaluated for the simulation of seasonal temperature and precipitation over India, and subsequently, using the best ones, their future projections are made for the country. NEX-GDDP is found to be the best performer for the simulation of surface air temperature for all the four seasons. For the simulation of precipitation, CMIP6 performs the best in DJF and MAM seasons, while NEX-GDDP performs the best in JJAS and ON seasons. The selected models suggest that temperature will increase over the entire Indian landmass, relatively more over the north-western part of the country. Furthermore, the rate of warming will be more in winter than in summer. The models also suggest that precipitation will increase over central eastern and north-eastern India in the monsoon season, and over peninsular India during post-monsoon months.

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

“…Interestingly, the intermodel uncertainty range is highest in case of the monsoon session, which is also evident from the time series plots (Figure 3). An analogous finding of least changes in monsoon temperature is also reported by Salunke et al (2023) in a recent study, which utilizes data from a different source, namely, the national aeronautics and space administration (NASA) earth exchange global daily downscaled projections (NEX‐GDDP). Moreover from Figure 3, we can observe a clear future shift in the underlying probability density functions (pdfs) of Tavg over different seasons.…”

“…The same for postmonsoon is 3.54 ± 0.5 C, followed by summer where a warming of 3.40 ± 0.61 C is expected, and lastly the least increase, although substantial enough, is found for monsoon, that is, 2.89 ± 0.74 C. Interestingly, the intermodel uncertainty range is highest in case of the monsoon session, which is also evident from the time series plots (Figure 3). An analogous finding of least changes in monsoon temperature is also reported by Salunke et al (2023) considering all the grid points across India, and hence depicts the spatial distribution of temperature over the country. As expected from our earlier outcome, the shift becomes more prominent under the SSP585 scenario and far-future period.…”