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Analysis of heatwave characteristics under climate change over three highly populated cities of South India: a CMIP6-based assessment

  • Civil Engineering and Sustainable Infrastructures
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Abstract

Climate change is arguably the most alarming global concern of the twenty-first century, particularly due to the increased frequency of meteorological extremes, e.g., heatwaves, droughts, and floods. Heatwaves are considered a potential health risk and urge further study, robust preparedness, and policy framing. This study presents an analysis of heatwave characteristics for historical (1980–2014), near-future (2021–2055), and far-future (2056–2090) scenarios over three highly populated cities of South India, i.e., Bangalore, Chennai, and Hyderabad. Two different approaches, i.e., the India Meteorological Department (IMD) criterion and the percentile-based criterion, are considered for defining the threshold of a heatwave day. Nine general circulation models (GCMs) from the Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6) experiment are selected, evaluated after bias correction, and the best performer was utilized to obtain the temperature projections corresponding to two shared socioeconomic pathways (SSP 2–4.5 and 5–8.5) for the future periods. The results reveal a high frequency of heatwave days over the cities in recent years from both approaches, which may further exacerbate in the future, thereby putting a large population at risk. The number of heatwave days is much higher for SSP5-8.5 than that for SSP2-4.5, depicting the direct effects of anthropogenic activities on the frequency of heatwaves. The detailed analysis of heatwave projections will help develop equitable heat resilient mitigation and adaptation strategies for the future, thereby alleviating their pernicious impacts.

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Data availability

The gridded temperature data all over India from IMD and the CMIP6 data are freely available. The data extracted for the three cities of India is available from the authors upon reasonable request.

Code availability

The Python codes are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

Authors are greatly thankful to the pangeo project (https://pangeo.io/). The current work is carried out using Pangeo CMIP6 data access, Pangeo cloud processing services, and with different Pangeo packages such as xarray, dask, and Jupyter. The authors also thank both the anonymous reviewers, whose constructive suggestions helped in improving the quality of the manuscript.

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  1. Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India, 400076

    Saswata Nandi

  2. Department of Water Resources Development and Management, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, India, 247667

    Sabyasachi Swain

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Sabyasachi Swain and Saswata Nandi: conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, visualization, and writing.

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Nandi, S., Swain, S. Analysis of heatwave characteristics under climate change over three highly populated cities of South India: a CMIP6-based assessment. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 99013–99025 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-22398-x

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