Climate and Weather

The first week of August 2010 brought extreme flooding and landslides to many parts of Asia. By August 11, floods in the Indus River basin had become Pakistan’s worst natural disaster to date, leaving more than 1,600 people dead and disrupting the lives of about 14 million people, reported Reuters. Across the border in northeast India, flash floods killed 185 with 400 still missing, reported BBC News. Floods in North Korea and northeast China buried farmland and destroyed homes, factories, railroads, and bridges. And in northwest China, rain triggered a massive landslide that left 702 dead with 1,042 missing, reported China’s state news agency, Xinhua. All of these disasters occurred as a result of unusually heavy monsoon rains, as depicted in the above image.

This presentation by ACWADAM deals with weather, the most fundamental process that shapes the earth. Meteorology, the science of studying weather, is described where some predictions can be made using atmospheric conditions or some data can be generated using simple equipments. These can in turn be used for measurement of weather for better implementation of a watershed project.

This set of case studies is a part of a book prepared by Lokayan in collaboration with the Planning Commission titled “Seeds of Hope", covering themes of agriculture, biodiversity, education, forestry, governance, health, movements and water. The case studies related to agriculture and food security are summarised below:

Water is a resource without which nothing would survive on this planet. 

The quantity and seasonality of water flow in a river may greatly change from its normal condition between a major storage and downstream, thus paving the way for drastic changes in the riverine ecosystem. ‘Environmental flow’ refers to the amount of water considered sufficient for protecting the structure and function of an ecosystem and its dependent species.

The paper goes on to describe the case of river Bhadra, which is the site of a dam that has significantly altered the natural flow of the river and describes the study that aimed at conducting the environment flow analysis of the river.

The presentation by ACWADAM deals with measurement of weather parameters and outlines the methods used in weather related data collection and analysis. Weather information is necessary for the planning and implementation of watershed programmes, especially in understanding factors like groundwater recharge, the relationship between recharge & discharge and in aspects like irrigation planning.

The study was done under the "Strategic Analyses of India’s National River Linking Project", of the Challenge Programme on Water and Food (CPWF) to estimate the available runoff in the potential regions to mitigate the terminal drought in the dominant rainfed districts of India. 

This paper by the Challenge Programme for Water and Food (CPWF) presents a simplified approach to combine remote sensing, census and weather data to analyze basin rice and wheat water productivity (WP) in Indo-Gangetic river basin, South Asia. It presents an innovative approach to combine meteorological data, ground survey, national census with remotely sensed imagery to assess water use, yield, and finally crop water productivity for the Indo-Gangetic rice-wheat cropping system in South Asia. 

This working paper by the Challenge Program for Water and Food explores the intersection between water management, climate change, and adaptation in the Ganges River system, a basin vital to the security, economy, and environment of South Asia. 

Recognizing that an understanding of both the science and the policy of water management, climate change, and adaptation is rapidly evolving, it is not the intention of the paper to encompass all the issues related to these broad fields, but rather to provide a starting framework from which to further develop research questions and priorities for work in water and adaptation.

The paper by the Challenge Program on Water and Food deals with the impact of climate change on water resources & glacier melt and potential adaptations in Indian agriculture. Global climatic changes will have major effects on precipitation, water availability, glacier/ice melt, and sea level rise. Climate-induced changes in hydrological conditions will affect the magnitude, frequency, and damage costs of future extreme events.