Keeping in view the peculiarities of India’s climate and of the summer monsoon in particular,
in a recent exercise a regional climate model (RCM) with 50 km resolution, namely, PRECIS
was deployed to dynamically downscale global model simulations and superimpose regional
details from India (GoI 2010). This exercise coupled with long instrumental records allows
us to capture past trends and also make projections for key climate variables such as
temperature and rainfall within the country at a disaggregated level.
As mentioned earlier, for India as a whole mean annual temperature shows a significant
warming trend of 0.51 degrees Celsius per 100 years during the period 1901-2007
(Kothawale et al., 2010). More important, accelerated warming has been observed in the last
approximately 40 years (1971-2007), mainly due to intense warming in the recent decade
1998-2007
10
. Increases in the mean have been accompanied by a rise in both maximum and
minimum temperatures at the all India level—by 0.71 and 0.27 degrees Celsius, respectively