Future climate change: Implications for Indian summer monsoon and its variability

The broad climatological features associated with the Asian monsoon circulation, including its mean state and intraseasonal and interannual variability over the Indian subcontinent, as simulated in the CCSR/NIES coupled A-O GCM in its control experiment are presented in this paper. The model reproduces the seasonal cycle as well as basic observed patterns of key climatic parameters, in spite of some limitations in simulation of the monsoon rainfall. While the seasonality in rainfall over the region is well simulated and the simulated area-averaged monsoon rainfall is only marginally higher than the observed rainfall, the peak rainfall is simulated to be about two-thirds of the observed precipitation intensity over central India. The transient experiments performed with the model following the four SRES 'Marker' emission scenarios, which include revised trends for all the principal anthropogenic forcing agents for the future, suggest an annual mean area-averaged surface warming over the Indian subcontinent to range between 3.5 and 5.5°C over the region during 2080s. During winter, India may experience between 5 and 25% decline in rainfall. The decline in wintertime-rainfall over India is likely to be significant and may lead to droughts during the dry summer months. Only a 10 to 15% increase is projected in area-averaged summer monsoon rainfall over the Indian subcontinent. The date of onset of summer monsoon over India could become more variable in future.