Climate Change and its Impacts on Selected Indian Hydrological Systems using Earth System and High-Resolution Modeling (NORINDIA)

Climate change issues are global in nature, yet they are quite variable at the regional scale and they affect most of the developing and under-developed regions in the world. Due to its diversified socio-economic and climatic regions, India is prominently vulnerable to the ensuing climate changes and related impacts. An increase in temperature and changes in the overall precipitation patterns have a profound impact on the water availability. This is especially the case for glacial melt or runoff generated in the Himalayan region. A large number of the Indian population is dependent on these water resources. India receives annual precipitation of about 4000 km3 of which 3000 km3 is received due to monsoon variability in this region. The river systems in India also consist of perennial and seasonal rivers depending on the monsoons to a larger extent. Thus the monsoon variability would have a large impact on the rainfall available for the reservoirs and access to water for the communities living there. The advent of climate change and its impact on glacier melt may lead to abrupt floods in regions neighboring the Himalayas. Impact sectors that are highly relevant for India are related to water security. The quality of the impacts assessments depends on the quality of the climate change projections. It is also essential to reduce the inherent uncertainties in a climate model by representing regional/local processes in an elaborate way, but also to estimate respective confidence intervals of these projections. Essentially, all adaptation strategies to address these sectoral vulnerabilities should also have the risk assessment components as well to estimate these inherent uncertainties – both due to systematic and cascaded biases. Climate models are the numerical tools, which provide the stakeholders and impact researchers with approximations of plausible changes in climate. The existing state-of-the-art general circulation models (GCMs) are yet to be fine-tuned to resolve the complexities of the Indian summer monsoon and other hydrological processes over regional scales. Understanding of the monsoon variability in the baseline and future time scales would in turn enrich the information available for policy makers and stakeholders for informed decision making. Prerequisites for such an assessment would mean downscaling of IPCC-based projections at high spatial resolution. The mitigation policies in India would also require such information, both at macro and micro scales, generated on this scientific basis. Thus, strengthened climate modeling capabilities in India could fill the gaps in providing important pre-requisites for an effective policy framework. This project draws its research activities on an existing partnership between Norway and India (TERI-BCCR Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs capacity building project) with new collaborators: a) in Norway: NILU, UiB, UiO, SN Power; b) in India: IITM and CMMACS. It is a multi-disciplinary project per se and very unique not only due to the gamut of participant institutions, but also due to its state-of-the-art science.