India's Successful Agricultural adaptation to Warmer Climate: Water Management as a key challenge.

INDIA'S ECONOMIC PROGRESS IN A CHANGING CLIMATE: BENEFITS OF GLOBAL WARMING

Madhav L Khandekar
Consulting Meteorologist, Unionville, Ontario, CANADA

I just returned from an extended visit to India, my country of birth, and was astounded by the rapid economic progress India has made in the last 25 years...As a weather & climate scientist, what impressed me was the fact that India's strong economic progress has come about in an increasingly warmer world of the last forty years or so, completely defying the projections of deleterious impact of Global Warming by IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, a United Nations Group of Scientists) and its supporters.

Let me explain:

... During my student days in Pune in early to mid-fifties, I remember distinctly that the city of Pune ( with a population of about half a million then, always enjoyed moderate climate because of its location in the foothills of the Western Ghats at an altitude of about 600 m) rarely recorded a maximum temperature over 35C.

Today, Pune and vicinity has a population of close to five million and with huge development of concrete buildings and other infra-structure, the city records maximum temperature of 37C and above for at least ten days or more, from Mid-March to Mid-May... Most of this increase in the mean maximum temperature at most mid-size to large cities in India has come about, primarily as a result of increased urbanization and land-use change... However, this increase in mean temperature has not adversely impacted India's economy or its people. India has significantly improved its grain, vegetable and fruit production in last fifty years. Let us look at some of the numbers:

India's rice production has grown four-fold, from 25 M tons in 1950 to about 100 M tons in 2000 (Selvaraju 2003) and most of India's rice production is in the southern region of India where mean temperature has increased by 1C. In Northwest India, winter wheat production has grown almost five-fold, from 12 M tons (1950) to about 60 M tons (2000), thanks to the Green Revolution inspired by the Nobel Peace laureate Norman Borlaug and improved irrigation technology in the state of Punjab. Production of fruits like bananas and mangoes has grown significantly in last 25 years, thanks to improved technology leading to growth of high-breed fruit varieties, suitable for a warmer climate. Indian fruits are enjoying increasing export to countries in the Middle East and Europe, while within India fruit packaging and processing industry has grown substantially. Supply of fresh vegetables and spices has also increased substantially in recent years (India is primarily a vegetarian country).

... Increased milk production has helped India's dairy industry to produce nutritious food for the younger generation

The Indian Monsoon is the most important climate event in India... Climate modelers and IPCC documents have projected a more vigorous global Monsoon and a more variable Asian Monsoon circulation in a warmer world. In reality, observed global monsoon circulation has weakened in the last fifty years (Chase et al 2003) while Indian/Asian Monsoon circulation, while showing decadal variability- from below normal to above normal over a 30-year period- shows no discernible impact of global warming at present (Kripalani et al 2003).

Decreasing summer Monsoon rains of last several years have aggravated water shortage situation in many regions, especially in the western State of Gujarat, where an ambitious project to divert waters of the Narmada River (which flows into the Arabian Sea near the Gulf of Khambhat) to the arid regions of north Gujarat is underway at present. Preliminary success of this project has prompted other local and regional governments to take up similar projects on other rivers, especially in southern India ... Providing adequate water for a billion plus populace of India is perhaps the most challenging problem for Indian scientists and policymakers at present. Numerous research and development projects are underway at present in many Universities and Technological Institutes on Monsoon variability, water resources and related issues.

Energy & Environment Vol. 17, No. 5, 2006
Dr. Madhav Khandekar is a former Research Scientist from Environment Canada and is presently on the editorial board of the Journal Natural Hazards ( Kluwer, Netherlands) and has published over 120 papers, reports, book reviews and a monograph on ocean surface wave analysis and modeling, published by Springer-Verlag in 1989. Khandekar is one of the external reviewers for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report to be published in 2007.


Update: The Indian Monsoon features in Science

Monsoon Forecasting

The agricultural output of India depends heavily on the strength of the summer monsoon. Most seasonal forecasts scale the strength of the monsoon to the intensity of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, a strategy that works well enough predicting heavy rains when equatorial Pacific sea surface temperatures are cold but not nearly as well in predicting drought when temperatures are warm. Krishna Kumar et al. (p. 115, published online 7 September) used Indian rainfall records extending back more than 130 years and an atmospheric general-circulation model to show that drought occurrence in central India depends on whether the warmest sea surface temperatures occur in the central or the eastern parts of the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Incorporating this result into forecasts of the monsoon could have a significant effect on economic planning and risk mitigation

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Originally published in Science Express on 7 September 2006
Science 6 October 2006:
Vol. 314. no. 5796, pp. 115 - 119
DOI: 10.1126/science.1131152

Reports
Unraveling the Mystery of Indian Monsoon Failure During El Niño
K. Krishna Kumar,1 Balaji Rajagopalan,2,3 Martin Hoerling,4* Gary Bates,4 Mark Cane5

The 132-year historical rainfall record reveals that severe droughts in India have always been accompanied by El Niño events. Yet El Niño events have not always produced severe droughts. We show that El Niño events with the warmest sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the central equatorial Pacific are more effective in focusing drought-producing subsidence over India than events with the warmest SSTs in the eastern equatorial Pacific. The physical basis for such different impacts is established using atmospheric general circulation model experiments forced with idealized tropical Pacific warmings. These findings have important implications for Indian monsoon forecasting.

1 Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, 411008, India.
2 Department of Civil Environmental and Architectural Engineering, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA.
3 Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA.
4 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Earth System Research Laboratory, Boulder, CO 80305, USA.
5 Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Palisades, NY 10964, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: martin.hoerling--AT--noaa.gov