UN models may be underestimating climate change effect on rainfall in India

The most advanced set of climate models used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Reports could be underestimating the impacts of climate change on rainfall over India, a new analysis has found.

The sixth Coupled Model Intercomparison Projects, or CMIP6, is a leading group of models that “simulate the physics, chemistry and biology of the atmosphere, land and oceans” to project the future impacts of climate change under various emission scenarios.

They are among the most advanced set of climate models widely used by researchers and policymakers to understand how climate change will affect weather patterns and socioeconomic development pathways across the world.

But while the CMIP6 is able to provide insights at a global level, it is likely to falter at a more regional level. A new study, correcting and downscaling the CMIP6’s projections, finds that at a regional scale over India, the CMIP6 is underestimating the magnitude of long and short duration extreme rainfall events in the future.

“These findings may provide fundamental insights to formulate national climate change adaptation policies for the extreme rainfall events,” the researchers, from the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology and the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, wrote in the paper.

Refining models

The study aims to understand the effects of climate change on the Indian summer...

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