Non-monsoonal precipitation response over the Western Himalayas to climate change

Krishnan, R.; Sabin, T. P.; Madhura, R. K.; Vellore, Ramesh; Mujumdar, Milind; Sanjay, J.; Nayak, Shailesh; Rajeevan, M.

doi:10.1007/s00382-018-4357-2

Cited by 67 publications

(57 citation statements)

References 64 publications

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“…The winter climate conditions over the HKH are favourable for cultivation of wheat and other winter crops. The changes in the westerly disturbance are also believed to increase the mass of some glaciers in the Karakoram and western Himalaya, popularly known as the "Karakoram Anomaly" (e.g., Forsythe et al 2017;Hewitt 2005), which is likely to continue into the future (e.g., Ridley et al 2013;Krishnan et al 2018; see Chap. 7).…”

Section: Climate Dominated By Monsoonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unravelling Climate Change in the Hindu Kush Himalaya: Rapid Warming in the Mountains and Increasing Extremes

Krishnan

Shrestha

Ren

et al. 2019

The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment

173

102

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Section: Climate Dominated By Monsoonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unravelling Climate Change in the Hindu Kush Himalaya: Rapid Warming in the Mountains and Increasing Extremes

Krishnan

Shrestha

Ren

et al. 2019

The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment

173

102

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“…It is also a way to better simulate the role of the orographic barrier played by the High-mountain Asia that stops the northward transport of moisture originating from the Indian subcontinent. This barrier explains the dryness of the Tibetan plateau (Krishnan et al, 2019;Ménégoz et al, 2014;Sabin et al, 2013), where an excess of moisture flux is simulated at coarse resolution, inducing a positive bias of snow cover that is enhanced by surface feedback. In the same way, by correcting the regional circulation, the nudging can reduce the positive bias of snow cover which impacts the surface albedo.…”

Section: Specific Regional Changesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improved Near‐Surface Continental Climate in IPSL‐CM6A‐LR by Combined Evolutions of Atmospheric and Land Surface Physics

Chéruy

Ducharne

Hourdin

et al. 2020

J Adv Model Earth Syst

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This work is motivated by the identification of the land-atmosphere interactions as one of the key sources of uncertainty in climate change simulations. It documents new developments in related processes, namely, boundary layer/convection/clouds parameterizations and land surface parameterization in the Earth System Model of the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (IPSL). Simulations forced by prescribed oceanic conditions are produced with different combinations of atmospheric and land surface parameterizations. They are used to explore the sensitivity to the atmospheric physics and/or soil physics of • major biases in the near surface variables over continents, • the energy and moisture coupling established at the soil/atmosphere interface in not too wet (energy limited) and not too dry (moisture limited) soil moisture regions also known as transition or "hot-spot" regions, • the river runoff at the outlet of major rivers. The package implemented in the IPSL-Climate Model for the Phase 6 of the Coupled Models Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) allows us to reduce several biases in the surface albedo, the snow cover, and the continental surface air temperature in summer as well as in the temperature profile in the surface layer of the polar regions. The interactions between soil moisture and atmosphere in hotspot regions are in better agreement with the observations. Rainfall is also significantly improved in volume and seasonality in several major river basins leading to an overall improvement in river discharge. However, the lack of consideration of floodplains and human influences in the model, for example, dams and irrigation, impacts the realism of simulated discharge. Plain Language Summary Land surface-atmosphere interactions play an essential role in the climate system. They strongly modulate the regional climates and have impacts on the global scale for instance through freshwater release into the oceans. Climate hazards (heat waves, droughts) and their impacts on populations also strongly depend on interactions between land and atmosphere and on their evolution with climate change. Climate models are precious tools to investigate how the Earth climate behaves. The sixth phase of the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) provides important tools to measure the progress and address the remaining open questions regarding the continental climate modeling. The representation of the land-atmosphere coupled system by the IPSL-Climate Model involved in CMIP6 is thoroughly evaluated against observations and compared with simulations using the CMIP5 version. Several biases concerning the temperature over land and over the ice sheets and with the snow cover are significantly reduced. Numerous improvements were made developping advanced parameterizations and tuning of the radiation and of the turbulent mixing in the atmospheric model. The realism of the seasonal

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“…They found that the 5-15 day bandpassed synoptic power of this field had a significant positive trend over the western Himalaya, but a significant negative trend over the Central Himalaya, in CFSR reanalysis (1979. Krishnan et al (2018) used the standard deviation of 4-15 day bandpassed 200 hPa geopotential height over upstream Iran as a proxy for Dec-Apr WD activity. They found that this field exhibits a significant positive trend in both ERA-40 (1958ERA-40 ( -2002 and ERA-Interim (1979 reanalyses.…”

Section: Observed Trends Of Wdsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The impacts of climate change on the winter water cycle of the western Himalaya

2020

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Some 180 million people depend on the Indus River as a key water resource, fed largely by precipitation falling over the western Himalaya. However, the projected response of western Himalayan precipitation to climate change is currently not well constrained: CMIP5 GCMs project a reduced frequency and vorticity of synoptic-scale systems impacting the area, but such systems would exist in a considerably moister atmosphere. In this study, a convection-permitting (4 km horizontal resolution) setup of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is used to examine 40 cases of these synoptic-scale systems, known as western disturbances (WDs), as they interact with the western Himalaya. In addition to a present-day control run, three experiments are performed by perturbing the boundary and initial conditions to reflect pre-industrial, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 background climates respectively. It is found that in spite of the weakening intensity of WDs, net precipitation associated with them in future climate scenarios increases significantly; conversely there is no net change in precipitation between the pre-industrial and control experiments despite a significant conversion of snowfall in the pre-industrial experiment to rainfall in the control experiment, consistent with the changes seen in historical observations. This shift from snowfall to rainfall has profound consequences on water resource management in the Indus Valley, where irrigation is dependent on spring meltwater. Flux decomposition shows that the increase in future precipitation follows directly from the projected moistening of the tropical atmosphere (which increases the moisture flux incident on the western Himalaya by 28%) overpowering the weakened dynamics (which decreases it by 20%). Changes to extreme rainfall events are also examined: it is found that such events may increase significantly in frequency in both future scenarios examined. Two-hour maxima rainfall events that currently occur in 1-in-8 WDs are projected to increase tenfold in frequency in the RCP8.5 scenario; more prolonged (1-week maxima) events are projected to increase fiftyfold.

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Non-monsoonal precipitation response over the Western Himalayas to climate change

Cited by 67 publications

References 64 publications

Unravelling Climate Change in the Hindu Kush Himalaya: Rapid Warming in the Mountains and Increasing Extremes

Unravelling Climate Change in the Hindu Kush Himalaya: Rapid Warming in the Mountains and Increasing Extremes

Improved Near‐Surface Continental Climate in IPSL‐CM6A‐LR by Combined Evolutions of Atmospheric and Land Surface Physics

The impacts of climate change on the winter water cycle of the western Himalaya

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