Research Projects

Due to increase in occurrence of extreme rainfall events (EREs) over India, there is a need to draw significant attention in the research of such weather systems. The various EREs occurred in past, namely Uttarakhand event in 2013, Chennai (Tamil Nadu) event in 2015 etc., which caused enormous devastation in terms of infrastructure, lives and livelihoods. The economy of our country and its growth largely depends on the vagaries of the weather and specifically on the "rainfall events" implicating the EREs could have an enormous societal and economic impact. The intense rainfall events at a specific location exceeding rainfall from normal, are known as EREs. The cloud bursts may be considered as EREs as well. India has experienced several EREs in recent years. The increased EREs may be attributed to the changing climate scenario. In this proposal, a comprehensive analysis will be carried out for improvement of the prediction of EREs and cloud bursts over north Indian region. The diagnostic study of EREs and cloud bursts would be carried out using satellite observations, reanalysis datasets namely, ERA5, IMDAA, CFSR, etc. A state-of-the-art WRF model with nested configuration would be adopted and customized over this region to investigate the EREs (including cloud bursts). The initial and boundary conditions for the meteorological fields would be used from the available gridded analyses data sets from NCEP, and NCMRWF and forecast fields. Also, the improved model initial conditions through data assimilation techniques using conventional and non-conventional observations would be prepared and used in the numerical simulations to study the impact on model predictability.