Excerpt

India has already witnessed a temperature rise of about 0.6° C over the last century. Though summer monsoon rainfall largely remains stable, in recent years a weakening in monsoon as well as increase in very-heavy precipitation events is being reported. Coupled Global circulation models provide an opportunity to project the future climate under different radiative-forcing scenarios or pathways. However due to their coarse resolution, GCMs are not very useful for regional and local level studies. For this purpose GCM projections are generally dynamically or statistically downscaled to higher resolutions using regional climate models. In India the climate downscaling effort has been spearheaded by the Centre for Climate Change Research at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology. Most studies use global and regional climate projections for projecting the impact of future climate change on different natural, production and human systems; and based on these projections, vulnerabilities to future climate are assessed and suitable adaptation options suggested.