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Drivers and mechanisms of heatwaves in South West India

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Abstract

Under global warming, heatwaves over India are projected to increase unequivocally. Thus, understanding the causal mechanisms responsible for heatwaves adds immense value to the country’s climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies. Although several studies have attempted to understand the physical mechanisms responsible for such events, efforts focusing on South-West India (SWI) are lacking. Here, using long-term observational data (1951–2020) and climate model simulations, we show that the heatwaves over SWI are influenced by major climatic modes, including El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), and the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD). The mechanism through which these climatic modes affect the SWI heatwaves is either by weakening of Pacific Walker circulation (ENSO and PDO) or by strengthening the Indian Ocean Hadley circulation (IOD). Further, we found that amongst these climatic modes, PDO explains the majority of the heatwave variability followed by IOD. However, post-1979, the scenario has changed remarkably with ENSO gaining prominence, signifying the strengthening of the relationship between ENSO and SWI heatwaves in the recent past. Overall, our study provides a first insight into the drivers and mechanism of the SWI heatwaves, whose value to designing heatwave adaptation strategies over the ecologically sensitive region can hardly be overemphasised.

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Data availability

The daily maximum temperature data from the IMD can be procured from https://www.imdpune.gov.in/cmpg/Griddata/Max_1_Bin.html. The large-scale atmospheric variables used in the present study can be downloaded from: NCEP-NCAR reanalysis data (https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.ncep.reanalysis.html). The climate indicators used in the present study can be procured from: ENSO (https://origin.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ONI_v5.php), PDO and IOD (https://psl.noaa.gov/gcos wgsp/Timeseries/). The GPP data can be procured from https://daac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/dsviewer.pl?ds_id=1789.

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Acknowledgements

VH acknowledges support from the Faculty Research Scheme of IIT (ISM) Dhanbad (FRS(176)/2022–2023/ESE). AK acknowledges support from the European Research Council ERC under grant agreement 101088405 (HEAT). The authors also acknowledge efforts of different organizations/people for making the data available for this work which includes NCEP-NCAR reanaysis and India Meteorology Department (IMD) datasets.

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No specific grant was given to this research by funding organisations in the public, private, or not-for-profit sectors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (ISM) Dhanbad, Jharkhand, 826004, India

    Ganaraj Dalal, Tinesh Pathania & Vittal Hari

  2. Laboratory of Catchment Hydrology and Geomorphology, School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, EPFL Valais Wallis, Sion, Switzerland

    Akash Koppa

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  1. Ganaraj Dalal
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Dalal, G., Pathania, T., Koppa, A. et al. Drivers and mechanisms of heatwaves in South West India. Clim Dyn (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-024-07242-x

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