ASET Colloquium

Observing the Indian monsoon – can we solve the problem of monsoon prediction?

by Dr. Andy Turner (University of Reading, UK)

Monday, October 26, 2020 from to (Asia/Kolkata)
at Online ( https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84569610829?pwd=QTczczhZazJSMjhDUzM5UDFqQitydz09 )
Meeting ID 845 6961 0829, Passcode 043038
Description
The Indian monsoon represents the lifeblood of India, supplying the majority of the country's rainfall in the few months of summer.  Since the monsoon dominates water supply, any variations in the timing, intensity and duration of the monsoon affect users across a variety of sectors.  These range from the obvious such as in agriculture and for human drinking water and sanitation, to industrial consumers, the coal and steel industries, hydroelectric generation and the stock market.  Breaks in the monsoon – cessations of the rains sometimes lasting for several weeks – can have large impacts particularly for agriculture, damaging the season's crop yield.  Meanwhile extremes of heavy rainfall (such as recent examples in Kerala, 2018, and Uttarakhand, 2013) can cause damage to infrastructure and large loss of life.  The impacts of such variability in the monsoon make forecasts vital, on time scales of a few days to weeks and the season ahead.

We discuss the performance of weather and climate models for forecasting the monsoon.  Despite years of research, these models suffer from large errors known as systematic biases, which partially limits our confidence in their messages.  We discuss some of the reasons for this, including the rapid development of the errors stemming from the “parameterisation” schemes that are designed to represent features, such cloud and rainfall, that need to be represented at the sub-grid scale.  This lecture discusses the INCOMPASS field campaign, which combined unique aircraft and surface observations in order to better understand some of the processes leading to the formation of monsoon storms and how they are controlled at large scales.

About the Speaker:

Andy obtained his PhD in Meteorology from University of Reading. He is an Associate Professor in Monsoon Systems funded jointly by the University of Reading's Academic Investment Programme and National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS), based in the Department of Meteorology. His general interests are in monsoon variability, predictability and prediction including the interaction between monsoon systems and other elements of the climate system. He was Co-Chair of the GEWEX/CLIVAR Monsoons Panel, is an Associate Editor of the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, and a Lead Author of the forthcoming Working Group I Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC. Andy was awarded the LF Richardson Prize of the Royal Meteorological Society (2009).
Material:
Organised by Dr. Satyanarayana Bheesette