Concerns over climate change and climatic variability are growing in South Asia because of the potential detrimental impacts of these phenomena on livelihoods. Such growing concerns demonstrate a need to assess how farmers simultaneously cope with extreme events and adapt to climatic variability.

Large-scale deforestation could cause monsoon rains to shift south, cutting rainfall in India by nearly a fifth warns this new study by Indian Institute of Science published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) 

Rainfall Variability is one of the key factors that affect agricultural production in any region. Hence the proper understanding of rainfall pattern and its trends may help water resources development and to take decisions for the developmental activities of that place. The present study is an attempt to evaluate the spatial and temporal rainfall variability of Anand district of Gujarat State in Western India.

Original Source

Climate extremes have profound implications for urban infrastructure and human society, but studies of observed changes in climate extremes over the global urban areas are few, even though more than half of the global population now resides in urban areas. Here, using observed station data for 217 urban areas across the globe, we show that these urban areas have experienced significant increases (p-value <0.05) in the number of heat waves during the period 1973–2012, while the frequency of cold waves has declined.

As the water vapor content in the atmosphere scales with temperature, a warmer world is expected to feature an intensification of the hydrological cycle. Work to date has mainly focused on mean precipitation changes, whose connection to climatic modes is elusive at a global scale.

This study is based on both the recent and the predicted twenty first century climatic and hydrological changes over the mountainous Upper Indus Basin (UIB), which are influenced by snow and glacier melting.

Western disturbances have a long history of climatological, synoptic and satellite observations based studies. In present study an attempt has been made to understand the different aspects of western disturbances like movement, associated convection, induce systems and associated weather. The western disturbances (WDs) during post monsoon and winter season have been selected for the study as they are mainly responsible for precipitation over western Himalayan region and adjoining plains of northwest India.