Session B9: Invited Session: FIP Symposium on the Science of Climate

Solar Variability and Climate Change

The need to distinguish natural from anthropogenic causes of climate change makes it important to understand and quantify any impact of the Sun. In this talk I will outline what is known about variations in solar output and review the evidence for solar influences on climate over a range of timescales. When the Sun is more active our work shows the response in temperature is not a warming of the tropics but mainly of mid-latitudes, along with a weakening and poleward shift of the jet streams and storm-tracks. Using climate models we have found that an important factor driving this response is the absorption in the stratosphere of solar UV radiation and we have identified a dynamical coupling mechanism which transfers a solar signal from the stratosphere to the atmosphere below. This means that simple assessments of the solar impact based on energy balance ideas may be effective in estimating global mean temperature change but might be neglecting important effects on regional climate. During the last solar cycle minimum the Sun was in a state of very low activity and some satellite measurements have suggested that the solar spectrum has been behaving in a strange and unexpected way. The talk will finish with a discussion of recent work on the implications of these spectral variations.   

On Winning the Race for Predicting the Indian Summer Monsoon Rainfall

Skillful prediction of Indian summer monsoon rainfall (ISMR) one season in advance remains a ``grand challenge'' for the climate science community even though such forecasts have tremendous socio-economic implications over the region. Continued poor skill of the ocean-atmosphere coupled models in predicting ISMR is an enigma in the backdrop when these models have high skill in predicting seasonal mean rainfall over the rest of the Tropics. Here, I provide an overview of the fundamental processes responsible for limited skill of climate models and outline a framework for achieving the limit on potential predictability within a reasonable time frame. I also show that monsoon intra-seasonal oscillations (MISO) act as building blocks of the Asian monsoon and provide a bridge between the two problems, the potential predictability limit and the simulation of seasonal mean climate. The correlation between observed ISMR and ensemble mean of predicted ISMR (R) can still be used as a metric for forecast verification. Estimate of potential limit of predictability of Asian monsoon indicates that the highest achievable R is about 0.75. Improvements in climate models and data assimilation over the past one decade has slowly improved R from near zero a decade ago to about 0.4 currently. The race for achieving useful prediction can be won, if we can push this skill up to about 0.7. It requires focused research in improving simulations of MISO, monsoon seasonal cycle and ENSO-monsoon relationship by the climate models. In order to achieve this goal by 2015-16 timeframe, IITM is leading a Program called Monsoon Mission supported by the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Govt. of India (MoES). As improvement in skill of forecasts can come only if R {\&} D is carried out on an operational modeling system, the Climate Forecast System of National Centre for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) of NOAA, U.S.A has been selected as our base system. The Mission envisages building partnership between operational forecasting agency and National and International R {\&} D Organizations to work on improving modeling system. MoES has provided substantial funding to the Mission to fund proposals from International R {\&} D Organizations to work with Indian Organizations in this Mission to achieve this goal. The conceptual framework and the roadmap for the Mission will be highlighted.   

Stratospheric ozone: a major (long neglected) anthropogenic forcing of the climate system

As a consequence of the Montreal Protocol, the depletion stratospheric ozone by CFCs, which occurred primarily in the last decades of the 20th Century, has noticeably slowed down in recent years. For instance, the ozone hole in 2012 has been measured to be the smallest in 20 years. In view of this, it has long been thought that the ozone hole is a ``solved problem.'' What has not been appreciated until very recently is that the large man-made perturbation of stratospheric ozone has had profound consequences on the climate system in the Southern Hemisphere. In fact, a lot of evidence is now at hand strongly suggesting that ozone depletion, not increasing greenhouse gases, have been been the major driver of observed atmospheric circulation changes in the Southern Hemisphere in the second half of the 20th Century. Furthermore, climate models robustly show that the closing of the ozone hole in the next half century will actually oppose the impact of increasing greenhouse gases, and project large cancellations between these two anthropogenic forcings resulting in greatly reduced future trends in the Southern Hemisphere.