Abstract
There is an emerging understanding toward the importance of land-atmosphere interactions in the monsoon system, but the effects of specific land and water management practices remain unclear. Here, using regional process-based experiments, we demonstrate that monsoon precipitation is sensitive to the choice of irrigation practices in South Asia. Experiments with realistic representation of unmanaged irrigation and paddy cultivation over north-northwest India exhibit an increase in the late season terrestrial monsoon precipitation and intensification of widespread extreme events over Central India, consistent with changes in observations. Such precipitation changes exhibit substantially different spatial patterns in experiments with a well-managed irrigation system, indicating that increase in unmanaged irrigation might be a factor driving the observed changes in the intraseasonal monsoon characteristics. Our findings stress the need for accurate representation of irrigation practices to improve the reliability of earth system modeling over South Asia.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 9126-9135 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Journal | Geophysical Research Letters |
Volume | 46 |
Issue number | 15 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Aug 16 2019 |
Funding
We thank Balwinder Singh for his guidance in debugging the irrigation implementation in the regional model code. The work presented here is financially supported by Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India, and National Environmental Research Council (UK) through Newton-Bhaba Project (MoES/NERC/IASWR/P2/09/2016-PC-II). A. D.'s visit to PNNL and M. H.'s effort were supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, as part of research in Multi-Sector Dynamics, Earth and Environmental System Modeling Program. M. A. was supported by the National Climate-Computing Research Center, which is located within the National Center for Computational Sciences at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and supported under a Strategic Partnership Project, 2316-T849-08, between DOE and NOAA. Support for model simulations, data storage, is provided by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at ORNL, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported under Contract DE-AC05-00OR22725. The authors declare no competing financial interests. The codes developed to implement irrigation, groundwater pumping, and paddy fields in WRF-CLM4 are made available through GitHub (placeholder: GitHub repository information). The ERA Interim reanalysis data are available on the ECMWF website. Observed gridded rainfall and temperature data and station soil moisture measurements are obtained from India Meteorological Department (IMD). ESA soil moisture data are acquired from http://www.esa-soilmoisture-cci.org website. SMOS Level 3 soil moisture product is acquired from French ground segment for the SMOS Level 3 and 4 data (https://www.catds.fr).
Keywords
- Indian monsoon
- irrigation in regional land-atmosphere model
- land-atmosphere interactions
- paddy irrigation
- regional modeling
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Input files for irrigation and paddy field implementation over South Asia in WRF-CLM4 (in EN)
Devanand, A. (Creator), Huang, M. (Creator), Ashfaq, M. (Creator), Barik, B. (Creator) & Ghosh, S. (Creator), DataHub, Aug 9 2019
DOI: 10.25584/data.2019-08.903/1548406
Dataset