Research Projects

The Himalaya, the world's most densely populated mountain system, is facing devastating climatic challenges such as floods, droughts, landslides, glacial lake outburst floods, and snow avalanches due to changes in climate variables. Over the last decade, flood events have occurred in the western Himalaya due to excessive precipitation, resulting in the loss of thousands of lives and natural resources. Additionally, precipitation failure has led to increasing drought events and societal unrest. The regional hydrology of the western Himalaya is regulated by the Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM) and Indian Winter Monsoon (IWM). However, the variability of monsoon patterns depends on several land and ocean factors, such as Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), coupled land-sea cooling and heating, El Niño-Southern Oscillations (ENSO), Pacific Decadal Oscillations (PDO), and North Atlantic Oscillations (NAO). A precise understanding of the variability of monsoonal systems is crucial for predicting future behavior and developing mitigation and water resource management plans. Limited high-resolution climate records restrict our understanding in the orography-dominated Himalaya. Annually resolved tree-ring widths and stable isotopes analysis can provide valuable insights into the variability of the monsoon system and the complexity of the forces influencing the ISM and IWM over different precipitation domains of the western Himalaya. This collective approach will provide a new frontier in understanding recent monsoon variability and its linkages to increasing natural hazards, which are important for sustainable environment, crop production, irrigation networks, water resource management, and land use land cover challenges in the Indian Himalaya.

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