The climate models will be prepared by the Pune-based Centre for Climate Change Research
Mysuru: India
will have its own climate change models to project the impact of global
warming over the decades and these will form part of the forthcoming
Sixth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Reports that is expected
to be available in 2020.
The IPCC reports — there have been five
so far since 1988 — are coordinated by the United Nations and bring
together the scientific consensus on the causes and impact of climate
change. They also assess the extent to which the globe is expected to
warm up over the medium and long term.
“We will be working on our
own models and projections and have to make our first submission by
2018,” said Madhavan Rajeevan, Secretary, Ministry of Earth Sciences, at
the Indian Science Congress here.
Crucial at Paris summit
The
IPCC’s fifth report in 2014, was critical in shaping the resolution at
the recently concluded climate talks in Paris that all countries —
developed and developing — had to, over time, do their bit to contain
their greenhouse gas emissions to keep ensure that mean global
temperatures did not rise beyond 1.5 to 2 degree of temperature in the
19th century.
As per the Paris Agreement, which will come into
effect in 2020, India and several other countries will have report their
emissions as well as detailed plans to curb them.
The climate
models, being developed by the Earth Sciences Ministry, will be prepared
by the Pune-based Centre for Climate Change Research.
These are
so-called dynamic models that rely on super-computers to compute the
weather on a given day and simulate how it would evolve over days,
months and even years. These models, developed in the United States,
have over few years been customised to Indian conditions. “Their ability
to predict the Indian monsoon has consistently improved over the years,
“said Mr. Rajeevan, “and now over the next few years they should be
able to project climate over the decades.”