Faculty Publications
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Item Large-scale atmospheric teleconnections and spatiotemporal variability of extreme rainfall indices across India(Elsevier B.V., 2024) Vinod, D.; Mahesha, A.Identifying trends in hydrometeorological time series during extreme weather events and their interactions with large-scale atmospheric teleconnections is crucial for climate change research. This study evaluates 14 precipitation-based indices recommended by the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI) across seven climatic zones of India using gridded daily rainfall data from the India Meteorological Department (IMD) for 120 years (1902–2021) utilised. Trend analysis was carried out using the Mann-Kendall (MK) test, Theil-slope Sen's estimator, Innovative Trend Analysis (ITA), and other statistical tools. Change point detection is established using the Pettitte test and Cumulative Sum algorithm. The relationships between large-scale atmospheric teleconnections and ETCCDI indices are also found, and Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) models are developed between them. The results show significant increasing trends in extreme rainfall indices in India's Ladakh region, located in the arid desert-cold climatic zone. The annual, Southwest Monsoon (SW-Monsoon), Northeast Monsoon (NE-Monsoon), and summer rainfall trends were positive, while winter rainfall had a negative trend across most climatic zones. Significant associations between large-scale atmospheric teleconnections, including Arctic Oscillation (AO), Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), Global Temperature Anomaly (GTA), Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), SST of Niño 3.4 region, Oceanic Niño Index (ONI), and Dipole Mode Index (IOD) and ETCCDI indices were established across multiple climatic zones. Using MLR analysis, this study attempts to establish, for the first time, the relationship between teleconnections and ETCCDI indices across India. Extreme rainfall indices are influenced by climate change during the SW-Monsoon across most of the climatic zones of India. During the previous El Niño event (2014–2016), average annual rainfall decreased by 19.5%, SW-Monsoon rainfall decreased by 25.2%, and NE-Monsoon rainfall decreased by 64.1% in India. The findings may provide valuable insights into mitigation strategies to sustain the adverse effects of extreme weather conditions and enhance climate resilience. © 2023 Elsevier B.V.Item Fortnightly Standardized Precipitation Index trend analysis for drought characterization in India(Springer, 2024) Benny, B.; Vinod, D.; Mahesha, A.Climate change is a major concern, as it profoundly affects many facets of our lives. It has brought about several issues, including declining water supply, reduced agricultural yields, increased drought occurrences, and increased heat waves. Amidst these challenges, the influence of short-term drought events on plant growth and irrigation schedule emerges as a critical concern. However, despite these evident consequences, a nuanced understanding of the intricate relationship between the severity and duration of short-period drought/deficit events still needs to be explored. This paper analyses fortnightly water deficit periods over different regions of India, which would be more relevant to re-scheduling the irrigation events than monthly or longer duration in preventing crops from reaching the permanent wilting point. Hence, this work considers analyzing 15-day Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) trends and drought characteristics using conventional methods and Innovative Trend Analysis (ITA) techniques. The analysis uses gridded rainfall data from the India Meteorological Department (IMD), which has a spatial resolution of 0.250-E and 0.250-N. The data spans the period from 1970 to 2021. The ITA and Mann Kendall (MK) displayed nearly identical areas of increasing and decreasing trends, but ITA effectively identified significant trends. While MK and Modified Mann Kendall (MMK) could only indicate significant trends for 12.94%, 9.57%, and 9.9% of grid points for SPI, drought severity, and duration, respectively, ITA was able to identify significant trends at 44.31%, 10.9%, and 10.1% on an annual scale. The ITA method effectively identified the significant trends and magnitudes of fortnightly SPI and drought characteristics. The Tropical monsoon (Am), Tropical savannah (Aw), Arid desert hot (BWh), Arid steppe hot (BSh), and Temperate dry winter warm summer (Cwb) climatic zones have shown a significant increase in annual drought severity. Similarly, a significant increase in monsoon drought severity is observed across several states, including Gujarat and Mizoram, impacting diverse geographic extents. The present study can help policymakers and water resource managers decide on water allocation, irrigation, and crop management practices. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature 2024.Item Downscaling algorithms for CMIP6 GCM daily rainfall over India(Springer, 2024) Raj, R.; Vinod, D.; Mahesha, A.The global climate models (GCMs) are sophisticated tools for determining how the climate system will respond. However, the output of GCMs has a coarse resolution, which is unsuitable for basin-level modelling. Global climate models need to be downscaled at a local/basin scale to determine the impacts of climate change on hydrological responses. The present study attempted to evaluate how effectively various large-scale predictors could reproduce local-scale rain in 35 different locations in India using artificial neural networks (ANN), change-factors (CF), K-nearest neighbour (KNN), and multiple linear regression (MLR). The selection of predictors is made based on the correlation value. As potential predictors, air temperature, geo-potential height, wind velocity component, and relative humidity at specific mean sea-level pressure are selected. The comparison of four different downscaling methods concerning the reproduction of various statistics such as mean, standard deviation at chosen locations, quantile–quantile plots, cumulative distribution function, and kernel density estimation of the PDFs of daily rainfall for selected stations is examined. The CF approach outperforms the other methods at almost all sites (R2 = 0.92–0.99, RMSE = 1.37–28.88 mm, and NSE = –16.55–0.99). This also closely resembles the probability distribution pattern of IMD data. © Indian Academy of Sciences 2024.Item Spatial Dependence of Extreme Rainfall and Development of Intensity-Duration-Frequency Curves Using Max-Stable Process Models(American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), 2025) Vinod, D.; Mahesha, A.The effective management of flood risk and urban drainage design hinges on a comprehensive understanding and accurate modeling of extreme rainfall variations, particularly in vulnerable areas. The study proposes to model spatial extreme rainfall across various durations in the Ganga River basin of India using max-stable processes (MSP). Incorporating geographical covariates like longitude, latitude, and elevation, 28 surface response models were constructed for location and scale parameters, with linear variations in marginal parameters while keeping the shape parameter constant across space. Various max-stable characterizations were evaluated using the Takeuchi information criterion (TIC) value and likelihood ratio test statistics, including Brown-Resnick, Smith, Extremal-t, Schlatter, and Geometric-Gaussian models with different correlation functions. The findings showed that the Brown-Resnick model consistently simulated well for shorter extreme rainfall for 3, 4, and 6-h and 36-h durations. The extremal coefficients revealed higher dependency between closer locations for most durations. In comparison with classical univariate extreme value theory (UEVT), the MSP exhibits a minimal overestimation in extreme rainfall intensity at New Delhi (by 13.6 mm/h) and Diamond Harbor (by 10.2 mm/h) stations for shorter durations, i.e., 2-h to 6-h range. Its estimations align within the uncertainty bounds of the identical and independent distribution (I.I.D) for longer durations. This suggests the importance of considering the strengths and limitations of M.S.P. and UEVT approaches for accurate rainfall intensity estimation, especially in flood risk management and urban drainage design. In data-sparse region/ungauged basins, where traditional methods like univariate UEVT may be limited due to the absence of observed rainfall data. The fitted max-stable processes MSP can serve as a valuable tool when relevant geographical covariates are known. © 2024 American Society of Civil Engineers.Item Modeling non-stationary 1-hour extreme rainfall for Indian river basins under changing climate(Elsevier B.V., 2025) Vinod, D.; Mahesha, A.India's complex topography and the increasing influence of climate change have exacerbated the challenges of modeling 1-hour non-stationary extreme rainfall events. Prior studies have indicated rising intensities of such events, particularly in coastal and urban areas. This study addresses these issues by developing 155 basin-specific non-stationary surface response models, incorporating geographical, climatic, and temporal covariates. Using 13 Max-Stable Process (MSP) characterizations, extreme rainfall variability across 11 major river basins and three-time scales were effectively modeled. The Brown-Resnick, Geometric-Gaussian, and Extremal-t models demonstrated varying effectiveness across regions. The findings emphasize the critical role of region-specific analysis in water resource management and disaster preparedness, where the high temporal resolution datasets are limited for the point process-based models. The global processes and regional climate change are found to predominantly influence 1-hour extreme rainfall across the majority of river basins in India. © 2025 Elsevier B.V.Item Characterizing extreme rainfall using Max-Stable Processes under changing climate in India(Elsevier B.V., 2025) Vinod, D.; Mahesha, A.Climate change has markedly intensified the frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall events globally over recent decades. The present investigation introduces a novel approach to modeling Intensity-Duration-Frequency (IDF) curves for major river basins in India using max-stable processes (MSPs). In contrast to earlier studies that mainly dealt with univariate extreme value theory and point-based IDF curves, this work uses a variety of MSP characterizations, such as Brown-Resnick, Schlather, Geometric Gaussian, and Extremal-t, to capture the spatial dependencies and non-stationary characteristics of extreme rainfall. This comprehensive two-stage modeling approach incorporates geographical covariates to capture spatial variation in extreme rainfall, followed by additional climate-informed covariates. One hundred fifty-six surface response models are analyzed across nine hourly extreme rainfall durations over 11 river basins. The Brown-Resnick process effectively captured spatiotemporal dependencies across all durations in the annual timeframe, while the Geometric Gaussian process also demonstrated strong performance. During the Indian Monsoon season, distinct covariates such as the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) and Global Temperature Anomaly (GTA) significantly influenced extreme rainfall patterns. The analysis reveals that the Brahmaputra basin consistently exhibits the highest short-duration extreme rainfall, while the Indus basin shows the lowest. Long-term projections indicate alarming trends, with potential short-duration extreme rainfall reaching 338.9 mm for a 100-year return period in the Godavari basin. The findings highlight the importance of updating IDF relationships in climate variability, providing insights that could lead to disaster preparedness and resilience planning for vulnerable communities across India. © 2025 Elsevier B.V.Item A multivariate index-flood approach for flood frequency analysis of ungauged watersheds: a case study on state of Kerala in India(Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH, 2025) HariKrishna, M.; Vinod, D.; Desai, S.; Mahesha, A.The multivariate index-flood method (MIF) advances flood risk evaluation at ungauged watersheds by utilizing information from gauged sites within a uniform region to forecast flood attributes where direct data is absent. It aims to enhance flood frequency analysis at ungauged watersheds by considering the interdependence between multiple flood variables using copulas and multivariate quantile curves. The proposed methodology involves screening data for anomalies, delineating homogeneous regions based on physiographic and hydrological descriptors, and selecting appropriate regional marginal distributions and copulas. Regional Flood Frequency Analysis and the index-flood method, MIF, can produce dependable multivariate quantile approximations, enhancing the precision of flood projections and risk evaluations at ungauged watersheds. Nine watersheds in the Indian state of Kerala situated along rivers flowing westward have been subjected to the suggested multivariate technique, which focuses on the bivariate case. This implementation involves recorded data series on flood volume and peak flow. The dataset includes daily maximum discharge data from India-WRIS, gridded precipitation and temperature data from IMD, and a 30 × 30 m DEM from USGS SRTM. The data record span 31–39 years. Subsequently, given a specific return period, a set of occurrences where volume and peak fall within a bivariate quantile curve is established at a designated watershed. The quantile curves derived from the regional methodology are juxtaposed with those obtained through the local method to assess the efficacy of the MIF technique. The model performed well for Arangali, Kalampur, Pattazhy, Pudur, and Mankara stations, as the quantile curves generated by the regional and local approaches matched well at these watersheds. In contrast, the regional and local quantile curves differ considerably at Perumannu, Ramamangalam, Kidangoor, and Erinjipuzha watersheds, indicating the effect of small sample size, higher sensitivity to local factors, modeling approach, and uncertainty involved. This investigation significantly enhances flood risk assessment in river areas using the MIF method to generate regional quantile curves, identify homogeneous regions, and compare regional and local quantile estimates, improving predictive accuracy at ungauged watersheds. The study confirmed data homogeneity across nine Kerala watersheds, with multivariate discordancy measures ?Di?<2.6, and a homogeneity test H value of -0.76. The BB8 copula best modeled the joint distribution of mean flood volume (V) and peak flow (Q), achieving a Kendall’s tau of 0.711 at Arangali. Regional quantile curves aligned well with standardized data, with the Gaussian copula (?)=0.4427, p<(1.75E-27) selected for multivariate regional analysis. © The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Institute of Geophysics, Polish Academy of Sciences 2025.Item Modeling of short-term meteorological drought under changing climate in Gujarat, India(Springer, 2025) Renuka, S.; Vinod, D.; Mahesha, A.Climate change exacerbates droughts globally, challenging traditional stationary methods in identifying natural hazards like droughts. This study examines short-term drought characteristics over Gujarat using three indices: Standardised Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI), Standardised Precipitation Index (SPI), and Reconnaissance Drought Index (RDI). Non-stationary models were developed using the Generalised Additive Models for Location, Scale, and Shape (GAMLSS) framework, incorporating local and large-scale climatic covariates and time across 11,700 model combinations. Drought patterns were analysed at fortnightly, monthly, and three-month timescales over 60 grid points. Results indicate that non-stationary droughts are more frequent, severe, and localised than stationary cases. The agreement between stationary and non-stationary methods improves with longer timescales. Among local covariates, diurnal temperature range (DTR) has the highest impact on drought characteristics across all indices and timescales. The Kutch region experiences the highest drought frequency with significantly reduced rainfall, with index values often below ? 1. This study highlights the critical role of non-stationary methods in accurately assessing drought patterns in climatically variable regions like Gujarat. The findings emphasise the need for advanced statistical approaches to enhance drought management and mitigation strategies by incorporating local and large-scale climate influences. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature 2025.