Response of the Indian summer monsoon to global warming, solar geoengineering and its termination.

The response of the Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM) to global warming, solar geoengineering and its termination is examined using the multi-model mean of seven global climate model simulations from G2 experiment of the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project. Under the global warming scenario, land-ocean temperature contrasts and low-level monsoon circulation progressively strengthen accompanied by enhanced precipitation over the Indian subcontinent. Notably, in the solar geoengineered scenario, marginal surface cooling is projected over the majority of the ISM region, and there is strengthening of both upper and lower level circulation. However, preferential precipitation near Western Ghats leads to dry bias over majority of Indian land. Upon the termination of the geoengineering, the climatic conditions-temperature, precipitation, winds and moisture would abruptly change to what it would have been under the global warming scenario. Thus, this may be important to note that such changes may need attention for the future mitigation and adaptation purposes if solar geoengineering is required to implement in future.

Indian Summer Monsoon Simulations: Usefulness of Increasing Horizontal Resolution, Manual Tuning, and Semi-Automatic Tuning in Reducing Present-Day Model Biases.

Coupled Global Climate Models (CGCMs) of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) are unable to resolve the spatial and temporal characteristics of the South Asian Monsoon satisfactorily. A CGCM with the capability to reliably project the global as well as the regional climatic features would be a valuable tool for scientists and policymakers. Analysis of 28 CMIP5 models highlights varying degree of biases in precipitation and 2 m surface air temperature (T2m) over south Asia, and the Community Earth System Model (CESM) developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research is found to be one of the best performing models. However, like all other CMIP5 models, CESM also has some inherent model biases. Using CESM, it is found that the precipitation and T2M biases reduce with increase in the model horizontal resolution from 2° to 0.5°. Further, a few deep convective parameters in the Zhang-McFarlane convection scheme are tuned for 2° and 1° model resolutions using both manual and semi-automatic model tuning methods. Comparing results from the two tuning methods we find that the performance of the manually tuned model is better than that of the semi-automated one.