Developing Reliable Climate Projections for the Continental Monsoon Regions

Abstract

Reliable regional climate projections provide critical input for devising mitigation strategies for sustainable development, as the climate variability and change continue to play vital role in economic growth of many sectors. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate experiments and multi-source observations generated huge volume of data, which continue to increase manifold and pose grand challenge in assessing regional reliability. Here, we develop a generic methodology to identify the reliable climate models based on the past observed time-scale dependent indices. Results show that not a single climate model from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) qualifies reliability across all continental monsoon regions. Thus, it is necessary to identify the set of reliable models for each monsoon region independently to develop reliable projections. The reliable composite had successfully represented the past climate and also significantly revises all model composite projected scenarios for most of the monsoon regions. This provides reliable projections which are useful for regional applications.