The future of the Indian monsoon

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The Indian monsoon is one of the most dramatic components of the Earth's climate system. It provides around 80% of annual rainfall in the Indian region, home to more than one billion people, making accurate forecasting of its timing, intensity and duration vital for agriculture and industry, which is forming an increasing proportion of the Indian economy. The Indian monsoon varies on many different timescales: extreme rainfall events can bring cities to a standstill, monsoon 'breaks' lasting several weeks can destroy crops, and on seasonal timescales events like El Nino can cause drought. Our understanding of these different variations in the monsoon is limited, and the computer models used to simulate them are often inadequate. Furthermore, our understanding of what will happen to the monsoon, its variations and drivers and the interactions between them in a warming climate has not been properly addressed. This fellowship will help determine how the Indian monsoon will change in response to human-induced forcing by focussing on changes to the mean monsoon and its distribution, changes to its different timescales of variability, and the relationships between these different timescales of variability. It will also examine how errors in our computer models of the climate system can affect the simulation of the monsoon. The result will be the capability to produce more reliable forecasts in the short and long term, thus also enabling more useful adaptation to human-induced change. The fellowship will be undertaken at the Department of Meteorology in the University of Reading, an institute internationally renowned for its expertise in weather and climate research in the tropics. Advanced techniques will be used to compare output from several state-of-the-art models of the ocean and atmosphere with observations from raingauge networks and satellite datasets. Experiments will be performed using the Met Office Hadley Centre model on high performance supercomputing facilities to find the causes of changes to the monsoon. By working with the Met Office, the results from this work will feed into the Joint Climate Research Programme, and regular contact with scientists in India will ensure that immediate benefits from this work can be seen. This fellowship directly addresses NERC themes and key areas of research identified by UK and EU funders and the LWEC (Living With Environmental Change) programme.