How extreme could the near term evolution of the Indian Summer Monsoon rainfall be?

Abstract

Abstract We provide a methodology to estimate possible extreme changes in seasonal rainfall for the coming decades. We demonstrate this methodology using Indian summer monsoon rainfall as an example however it can be extended to other climate variables, regions and timescale conditional to the model forecasts being a good representative of the observations in current climate. We use an ensemble of ~1600 initialized climate simulations from selected seasonal prediction systems to estimate internal variability and how it can exacerbate or alleviate forced climate change. Our estimates show that for the next decade there is a ~60% chance of wetting trends whereas the chance of drying is ~40%. Wetting trends are systematically more favoured than drying with increasing length of the period. This provides a quantitative explanation for the varying trends in the past observational record of rainfall over India. We also quantify the likelihood of extreme trends and show that there is at least a 1% chance that monsoon rainfall could increase or decrease by one fifth over the next decade and that more extreme trends, though unlikely, are possible. We find that monsoon rainfall trends are influenced by trends in sea-surface temperatures over the Niño3.4 region and tropical Indian Ocean, and ~1.5° cooling or warming of these regions can approximately double or negate the influence of climate change on rainfall over the next two decades. We also investigate the time-of-emergence of climate change signals in rainfall trends and find that it is unlikely for a climate change signal to emerge by the year 2050 due to the large internal variability of monsoon rainfall. The estimates of extreme rainfall change provided here could be useful for governments to prepare for worst-case scenarios and therefore aid disaster preparedness and decision-making.