Socioeconomic challenges continue to mount for half a billion residents of central India because of a decline in the total rainfall and a concurrent rise in the magnitude and frequency of extreme rainfall events. Alongside a weakening monsoon circulation, the locally available moisture and the frequency of moisture-laden depressions from the Bay of Bengal have also declined. Here we show that despite these negative trends, there is a threefold increase in widespread extreme rain events over central India during 1950–2015. The rise in these events is due to an increasing variability of the low-level monsoon westerlies over the Arabian Sea, driving surges of moisture supply, leading to extreme rainfall episodes across the entire central subcontinent. The homogeneity of these severe weather events and their association with the ocean temperatures underscores the potential predictability of these events by two-to-three weeks, which offers hope in mitigating their catastrophic impact on life, agriculture and property.

Rising propensity of precipitation extremes and concomitant decline of summer-monsoon rains are amongst the most distinctive hydroclimatic signals that have emerged over South Asia since 1950s. A clear understanding of the underlying causes driving these monsoon hydroclimatic signals has remained elusive. Using a state-of-the-art global climate model with high-resolution zooming over South Asia, we demonstrate that a juxtaposition of regional land-use changes, anthropogenic-aerosol forcing and the rapid warming signal of the equatorial Indian Ocean is crucial to produce the observed monsoon weakening in recent decades. Our findings also show that this monsoonal weakening significantly enhances occurrence of localized intense precipitation events, as compared to the global-warming response. A 21 st century climate projection using the same high-resolution model indicates persistent decrease of monsoonal rains and prolongation of soil drying. Critical value-additions from this study include (a) realistic simulation of the mean and long-term historical trends in the Indian monsoon rainfall (b) robust attributions of changes in moderate and heavy precipitation events over Central India (c) a 21 st century projection of drying trend of the South Asian monsoon. The present findings have profound bearing on the regional water-security, which is already under severe hydrologicalstress.

Extreme precipitation events over India have resulted in loss of human lives and damaged infrastructures, food crops, and lifelines. The inability of climate models to credibly project precipitation extremes in India has not been helpful to longer-term hazards resilience policy. However, there have been claims that finer-resolution and regional climate models may improve projections. The claims are examined as hypotheses by comparing models with observations from 1951-2005. This paper evaluates the reliability of the latest generation of general circulation models (GCMs), Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5), specifically a subset of the better performing CMIP5 models (called "BEST-GCM"). The relative value of finer-resolution regional climate models (RCMs) is examined by comparing Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) South Asia RCMs ("CORDEX-RCMs") versus the GCMs used by those RCMs to provide boundary conditions, or the host GCMs ("HOST-GCMs"). Ensemble mean of BEST-GCMs performed better for most of the extreme precipitation indices than the CORDEX-RCMs or their HOST-GCMs. Weaker performance shown by ensemble mean of CORDEX-RCMs is largely associated with their high intermodel variation. The CORDEX-RCMs occasionally exhibited slightly superior skills compared to BEST-GCMs; on the whole RCMs failed to significantly outperform GCMs. Observed trends in the extremes were not adequately captured by any of the model ensembles, while neither the GCMs nor the RCMs were determined to be adequate to inform hydrologic design.

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