Author(s): P. P. Mujumdar; Arpita Mondal
Linked Author(s):
Keywords: No Keywords
Abstract: For studying the effects of climate change in regional hydrology as well as for obtaining reliable hydrologic projections, it is important to understand, detect and attribute human-induced climate change in the observed hydrological changes in the recent past. Over the last two decades, detection and attribution (D&A) of climate change has emerged as a formal tool to decipher the complex causes of changes in the climate. This article summarises the recent works of the authors conducted on D&A of human-induced climate change in regional hydrology, addressing scale issues and considering variability across various climate model simulations. The fingerprint method of D&A is used to study changes in regional monsoon precipitation and streamflow in the Mahanadi river basin, along with a statistical downscaling model to obtain precipitation corresponding to the various climate model runs. A genetic programming-based rainfall-runoff model is used to compute corresponding streamflows from the precipitation. Thereafter, focussing on detection of anthropogenic emission-induced climate change in global and regional extreme precipitation, consideration of non-stationarity in the D&A analysis is found to produce significant differences at regional scales important for impact assessment studies.
Year: 2013