Assessing Severe Drought and Wet Events over India in a Future Climate Using a Nested Bias-Correction Approach
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 18, Issue 7
Abstract
General circulation models (GCMs) are routinely used to simulate future climatic conditions. However, rainfall outputs from GCMs are highly uncertain in preserving temporal correlations, frequencies, and intensity distributions, which limits their direct application for downscaling and hydrological modeling studies. To address these limitations, raw outputs of GCMs or regional climate models are often bias corrected using past observations. In this paper, a methodology is presented for using a nested bias-correction approach to predict the frequencies and occurrences of severe droughts and wet conditions across India for a 48-year period (2050–2099) centered at 2075. Specifically, monthly time series of rainfall from 17 GCMs are used to draw conclusions for extreme events. An increasing trend in the frequencies of droughts and wet events is observed. The northern part of India and coastal regions show maximum increase in the frequency of wet events. Drought events are expected to increase in the west central, peninsular, and central northeast regions of India.
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Acknowledgments
This work is partially supported by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, through AISRF Project No. DST/INT/AUS/P-27/2009. The second author acknowledges support from the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India, through Project No. MoES/ATMOS/PP-IX/09.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 18 • Issue 7 • July 2013
Pages: 760 - 772
Copyright
© 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Aug 5, 2011
Accepted: Jan 9, 2012
Published online: Jan 12, 2012
Published in print: Jul 1, 2013
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