The Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology’s (IITM) Centre for Climate Change Research has developed a new, state-of-the-art Earth system model (ESM) that has been used to create the National Climate Change Assessment report in order to support policy decisions on climate change, adaptation and mitigation.
According to the organization, this report is the first of its kind where a comprehensive discussion has been made regarding the impact of human-induced global climate change on the regional climate and monsoon of the Indian subcontinent, adjoining the Indian Ocean and the Himalayas.
Based on the available climate records, the report documents that the surface air temperature over India has risen by about 0.7°C during 1901–2018, which is accompanied by an increase in atmospheric moisture content. The sea surface temperatures in the tropical Indian Ocean also increased by about 1°C during 1951–2015. The report states that clear signatures of human-induced changes in climate have emerged over the Indian region, which it attributes to anthropogenic GHG and aerosols and changes in land use and land cover, and that these have contributed to an increase in the climatic extremes.
Mission Mausam
For this reason, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has prepared a Climate Hazards and Vulnerability Atlas of India for the 13 most hazardous meteorological events, including cold waves, heat waves, floods, lightning, snowfall, dust storms, hailstorms, thunderstorms, fog, strong winds, extreme rainfall, droughts and cyclones, which is intended to safeguard the citizens living in the vulnerable regions.
The Union Cabinet has also approved the central sector scheme ‘Mission Mausam’ at an outlay of Rs2,000 crores (US$240m) over two years. The main aim of the mission is to make Bharat weather-ready and climate-smart and provide early warning to all. Mission Mausam is envisaged to be a multi-faceted and transformative initiative to tremendously boost India’s weather and climate-related science, research and services.
Mission Mausam is intended to cater to the weather and climate-sensitive sectors like agriculture, power, irrigation, shipping, water resource management, health, aviation, transportation, disaster management, off-shore oil management, public safety, etc., by mitigating the impact of climate change and extreme weather events and strengthening the resilience of the communities to severe weather phenomenon.
Early warning systems
IMD has also adopted new techniques and technology from time to time to detect, monitor and provide timely early warnings for disruptive weather events. Initiatives and developments have been taken to improve the monitoring and forecasting of weather events by augmenting the observational network, numerical weather prediction models and supercomputers.
IMD uses a forecasting system at seasonal to nowcast scale and implemented well-defined standard operating procedures (SOPs) for monitoring and forecasting weather hazards. IMD uses a dissemination system to share all severe weather information and early warnings with disaster management authorities and the general public through various platforms/channels for necessary preparedness and to support mitigation measures. These include social media, the common alert protocol, mobile apps, WhatsApp and APIs. As a result, the vulnerable population in rural and coastal areas can get evacuated on time to safe shelters, thereby reducing the human death toll to a bare minimum.
In related news, the 14th Asia-Oceania Meteorological Satellite Users’ Conference (AOMSUC-14) was recently held in New Delhi, India. Click here to read the full story.