Trends and variability of droughts over the Indian monsoon region

Mallya, Ganeshchandra; Mishra, Vimal; Niyogi, Dev; Tripathi, Shivam; Govindaraju, Rao S.

doi:10.1016/j.wace.2016.01.002

Cited by 234 publications

(143 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…The climate in most parts of India is tropical or temperate and hence, the vegetation productivity is controlled by the water/precipitation (Running et al., ; Sun et al., ). However, an increase in both drought severity and frequency has been reported both globally (Dai, , ) and in India (Mallya, Mishra, Niyogi, Tripathi, & Govindaraju, ). In addition, droughts in India have shifted toward the agriculturally important Indo‐Gangetic, central Maharashtra, and coastal south‐India plains in recent past (Mallya et al., ), which adds to the risk for food security in future as it has already been a serious concern due to overexploited groundwater (Asoka, Gleeson, Wada, & Mishra, ) and fluctuating monsoon rainfall (Mallya et al., ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessment of ecosystem resilience to hydroclimatic disturbances in India

Sharma

Goyal

2017

Global Change Biology

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Recent studies have shown an increasing trend in hydroclimatic disturbances like droughts, which are anticipated to become more frequent and intense under global warming and climate change. Droughts adversely affect the vegetation growth and crop yield, which enhances the risks to food security for a country like India with over 1.2 billion people to feed. Here, we compared the response of terrestrial net primary productivity (NPP) to hydroclimatic disturbances in India at different scales (i.e., at river basins, land covers, and climate types) to examine the ecosystems' resilience to such adverse conditions. The ecosystem water use efficiency (WUE : NPP/Evapotranspiration) is an effective indicator of ecosystem productivity, linking carbon (C) and water cycles. We found a significant difference (p < .05) in WUE across India at different scales. The ecosystem resilience analysis indicated that most of the river basins were not resilient enough to hydroclimatic disturbances. Drastic reduction in WUE under dry conditions was observed for some basins, which highlighted the cross-biome incapability to withstand such conditions. The ecosystem resilience at land cover and climate type scale did not completely relate to the basin-scale ecosystem resilience, which indicated that ecosystem resilience at basin scale is controlled by some other ecohydrological processes. Our results facilitate the identification of the most sensitive regions in the country for ecosystem management and climate policy making, and highlight the need for taking sufficient adaptation measures to ensure sustainability of ecosystems.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessment of ecosystem resilience to hydroclimatic disturbances in India

Sharma

Goyal

2017

Global Change Biology

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“…Mallya et al . [] have shown that these changes in the dry/wet spells are robust and independent of either the methodology or the resolution of the rainfall data sets. Hence, based on these studies, it is evident that the Indian monsoon region is a seat of significant change in the characteristics of extremes and that the assumption of stationarity in ISMR extremes is thus open to debate.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urbanization causes nonstationarity in Indian Summer Monsoon Rainfall extremes

Singh

Hari

Karmakar

et al. 2016

Geophysical Research Letters

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Global and local environmental changes are likely to introduce nonstationarity in the characteristics of Indian Summer Monsoon Rainfall (ISMR) extremes. Here we perform a nonstationary frequency analysis on ISMR extremes in a Generalized Additive Model for Location, Scale and Shape framework with a cluster of 74 models, considering nonstationarity in different possible combinations. Interestingly, we observe significant nonstationarity in ISMR extremes in urbanizing/developing‐urban areas (transitioning from rural to urban), compared to completely urbanized or rural areas. This presents a postulation that the extent of urbanization plays a significant role in introducing nonstationarity in ISMR extremes. We emphasize the effect of urbanization in changing the character of ISMR extremes, which further needs a scientific re‐evaluation by implementing physics‐based modeling. The impact of these observational studies will be critical in correcting the bias of model projections of ISMR.

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“…Therefore, it is timely to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the distribution, duration, severity, and trends of these droughts simultaneously as their interactions are still relatively unknown, especially in India. The relationship between these four different kinds of drought and crop production is also lacking in the previous studies323334. For example, questions such as which type of drought has the most significant impact on wheat yield loss, and does this relationship vary with time, need to be addressed.…”

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confidence: 99%

Droughts in India from 1981 to 2013 and Implications to Wheat Production

Zhang

Obringer

Wei

et al. 2017

Sci Rep

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100

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Understanding drought from multiple perspectives is critical due to its complex interactions with crop production, especially in India. However, most studies only provide singular view of drought and lack the integration with specific crop phenology. In this study, four time series of monthly meteorological, hydrological, soil moisture, and vegetation droughts from 1981 to 2013 were reconstructed for the first time. The wheat growth season (from October to April) was particularly analyzed. In this study, not only the most severe and widespread droughts were identified, but their spatial-temporal distributions were also analyzed alone and concurrently. The relationship and evolutionary process among these four types of droughts were also quantified. The role that the Green Revolution played in drought evolution was also studied. Additionally, the trends of drought duration, frequency, extent, and severity were obtained. Finally, the relationship between crop yield anomalies and all four kinds of drought during the wheat growing season was established. These results provide the knowledge of the most influential drought type, conjunction, spatial-temporal distributions and variations for wheat production in India. This study demonstrates a novel approach to study drought from multiple views and integrate it with crop growth, thus providing valuable guidance for local drought mitigation.

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Trends and variability of droughts over the Indian monsoon region

Cited by 234 publications

References 31 publications

Assessment of ecosystem resilience to hydroclimatic disturbances in India

Assessment of ecosystem resilience to hydroclimatic disturbances in India

Urbanization causes nonstationarity in Indian Summer Monsoon Rainfall extremes

Droughts in India from 1981 to 2013 and Implications to Wheat Production

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