Research Projects

The Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM) is a significant factor in the livelihood of over a billion people in the south Asian region. Its behavior depends on quasi-periodic oscillations, with periods ranging from a few days to a decadal timescale. A dominant mode of variability is the intraseasonal (ISO) timescale (20-70 days), which exhibits northward propagation from the equator to the foothills of the Himalayas. Spells of heavy rainfall or no rain events are strongly associated with this mode. This proposal aims to study the Indian monsoon at an intraseasonal time scale using innovative techniques to unravel the complexity of the northward propagation of ISO. Data-adaptive techniques like Multichannel Singular Spectrum Analysis (MSSA) have been developed recently for extracting ISO from noisy atmospheric data. A python-based toolkit will be developed to identify ISO signals in rainfall and other datasets. Recent studies emphasize the interaction between convection and vorticity in understanding ISO variability over the Indian region and the western Pacific. Moisture budget analysis could be essential for diabatic processes directly involving deep convection in both observations and models. The project aims to develop a diagnosis framework of the moist static energy budget for the observed ISO and implement it to understand the key strengths and weaknesses of the Climate Forecast System output datasets in extended range predictions obtained from the Indian Institute Of Tropical Meteorology, Maharashtra (IITM).