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.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
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.
References
Anandhi, A., Srinivas, V. V., Nanjundiah, R. S., and Nagesh Kumar, D. (2008). “Downscaling precipitation to river basin in India for IPCC SRES scenarios using support vector machine.” Int. J. Climatol., 28(3), 401–420.
Bhuiyan, C., Singh, R. P., and Kogan, F. N. (2006). “Monitoring drought dynamics in the Aravalli region (India) using different indices based on ground and remote sensing data.” Int. J. Appl. Earth Obs. Geoinf., 8(4), 289–302.
Bordi, I., Fraedrich, K., and Sutera, A. (2009). “Observed drought and wetness trends in Europe: An update.” Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 13(8), 1519–1530.
Burke, E. J., and Brown, S. J. (2008). “Evaluating uncertainties in the projection of future drought.” J. Hydrometeorol., 9(2), 292–299.
Bussay, A., Szinell, C., and Szentimery, T. (1999). Investigation and measurements of droughts in Hungary, Hungarian Meteorological Service, Budapest, Hungary.
Dhanya, C. T., and Nagesh Kumar, D. (2009). “Data mining for evolution of association rules for droughts and floods in India using climate inputs.” J. Geophys. Res., 114(D2), D02102.
Ghosh, S., and Mujumdar, P. P. (2007). “Nonparametric methods for modeling GCM and scenario uncertainty in drought assessment.” Water Resour. Res., 43(7), W07405.
Guttman, N. B. (1999). “Accepting the Standardized Precipitation Index: A calculation algorithm.” J. Am. Water Resour. Assoc., 35(2), 311–322.
Hashino, T., Bradley, A. A., and Schwartz, S. S. (2007). “Evaluation of bias-correction methods for ensemble streamflow forecasts.” Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 11(2), 939–950.
Hayes, M. J., Svoboda, M. D., Wilhite, D. A., and Vanyarkho, O. V. (1999). “Monitoring the 1996 drought using the Standardized Precipitation Index.” Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc., 80(3), 429–438.
Hennessy, K., et al. (2008). “An assessment of the impact of climate change on the nature and frequency of exceptional climatic events.” CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology Rep. to the Australian Government, CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology, Canberra, Australia, 〈http://www.daff.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/721285/csiro-bom-report-future-droughts.pdf〉 (Jul. 23, 2008).
Houghton, J. T., Jenkins, G. J., and Ephraums, J. J., eds. (1990). Climate change: The IPCC scientific assessment, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Hughes, B. L., and Saunders, M. A. (2002). “A drought climatology for Europe.” Int. J. Climatol., 22(13), 1571–1592.
Johnson, F. M., and Sharma, A. (2009). “Measurement of GCM skill in predicting variables relevant for hydroclimatological assessments.” J. Clim., 22(16), 4373–4382.
Johnson, F. M., and Sharma, A. (2011). “Accounting for interannual variability: A comparison of options for water resources climate change impact assessments.” Water Resour. Res., 47(4), W04508.
Johnson, F. M., and Sharma, A. (2012). “A nesting model for bias correction of variability at multiple time scales in general circulation model precipitation simulations.” Water Resour. Res., 48(1), W01504.
Maity, R., and Nagesh Kumar, D. (2008). “Basin-scale streamflow forecasting using the information of large-scale atmospheric circulation phenomena.” Hydrol. Processes, 22(5), 643–650.
Maity, R., Nagesh Kumar, D., and Nanjundiah, R. S. (2007). “Review of hydroclimatic teleconnection between hydrologic variables and large scale atmospheric circulation patterns with Indian perspective.” ISH J. Hydraul. Eng., 13(1), 77–92.
McKee, T. B., Doeskin, N. J., and Kieist, J. (1993). “The relationship of drought frequency and duration to time scales.” Proc., 8th Conf. on Applied Climatology, American Meteorological Society, Boston, 179–184.
McKee, T. B., Doeskin, N. J., and Kieist, J. (1995). “Drought monitoring with multiple time scales.” Proc., 9th Conf. on Applied Climatology, American Meteorological Society, Boston, 233–236.
Meehl, G. A., et al. (2007). “Global climate projections.” Climate change 2007: The physical science basis, S. Solomon, et al., eds., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 747–846.
Mehrotra, R., and Sharma, A. (2010). “Development and application of a multisite rainfall stochastic downscaling framework for climate change impact assessment.” Water Resour. Res., 46(7), W07526.
Mehrotra, R., Sharma, A., Nagesh Kumar, D., and Reshmidevi, T. V. (2013). “Assessing future rainfall projections using multiple GCMs and a multi-site stochastic downscaling model.” J. Hydrol., 488, 84–100.
Mishra, A. K., and Singh, V. P. (2010). “A review of drought concepts.” J. Hydrol., 391(1–2), 202–216.
Morid, S., Smakhtin, V. E., and Moghaddasic, M. (2006). “Comparison of seven meteorological indices for drought monitoring in Iran.” Int. J. Climatol., 26(7), 971–985.
Ntale, H. K., and Gan, T. Y. (2003). “Drought indices and their application to East Africa.” Int. J. Climatol., 23(11), 1335–1357.
Piani, C., Haerter, J. O., and Coppola, E. (2010). “Statistical bias correction for daily precipitation in regional climate models over Europe.” Theor. Appl. Climatol., 99(1–2),187–192.
Rajeevan, M., Bhate, J., Kale, J. D., and Lal, B. (2006). “High resolution daily gridded rainfall data for the Indian region: Analysis of break and active monsoon spells.” Curr. Sci., 91(3), 296–306.
Seiler, R. A., Hayes, M., and Bressan, L. (2002). “Using the Standardized Precipitation Index for flood risk monitoring.” Int. J. Climatol., 22(11), 1365–1376.
Sharma, M., Coulibaly, P., and Dibike, Y. (2011). “Assessing the need for downscaling RCM data for hydrologic impact study.” J. Hydrol. Eng., 16(6), 534–539.
Szalai, S., and Szinell, C. (2000). “Comparison of two drought indices for drought monitoring in Hungary—a case study.” Drought and drought mitigation in Europe, J. V. Vogt and F. Somma, eds., Kluwer, Dordrecht, Netherlands, 161–166.
Tang, Y., Lin, H., and Moore, A. M. (2008). “Measuring the potential predictability of ensemble climate predictions.” J. Geophys. Res., 113(D4), D04108.
Wilby, R. L., and Wigley, T. M. L. (2000). “Precipitation predictors for downscaling: Observed and general circulation model relationships.” Int. J. Climatol., 20(6), 641–661.
Wood, A. W., Leung, L. R., Sridhar, V., and Lettenmaier, D. P. (2004). “Hydrologic implications of dynamical and statistical approaches to downscaling climate model outputs.” Clim. Change, 62(1–3), 189–216.
Xu, C. Y. (1999). “Climate change and hydrologic models: A review of existing gaps and recent research developments.” Water Resour. Manage., 13(5), 369–382.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
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
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.