To improve climate prediction skills, understanding the role of natural factors needs advancement alongside proper attribution of human-induced anthropogenic influence. To enhance knowledge about climate variability and advance future predictive skills, it is important to ascertain the role of natural factors. In this regard, the role of the sun and strong volcanoes will be explored. As the sun is the primary source of energy of our climate system, I will investigate its role in atmosphere-ocean coupling. In terms of large volcanoes, the effect of aerosols and various direct and indirect effects will be discussed. Following the strength of eruption, sites of origin and eruption timings within the seasonal time of the year, volcanoes can have different regional and global impacts and can cause various climate extremes, including droughts and floods. As active phases of the solar decadal cycle and strong volcanoes both modulate stratospheric ozone, their combined influence deserves attention too. All such analyses using natural drivers can improve future predictive skills in varied ranges from near-term out to seasons and decades.
In the next part, I will focus on the Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM) and the East African monsoon. For ISM, some results of teleconnection between the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and ISM rainfall will be presented for both historical and future scenarios, analysing CMIP simulations. For the East African monsoon, I used observational data and focused on the October-November-December (OND) rainy season, where two important large-scale climate drivers, the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) and ENSO were identified. Interestingly, using the combined phases of these two drivers, it is possible to deliver an estimation of cumulative rain and onset dates of rainy season, even one season in advance. Results have implications for flood/drought management, disaster risk reduction and future planning in optimizing energy and agricultural outputs. The livelihood of millions of East Africans will be impacted.
Dr Indrani Roy is a Climate Scientist and undertook her PhD at Imperial College, London, within the Space and Atmospheric Research Group. Since receiving her PhD, she has worked in various premier academic institutions in the UK, including Imperial College, the University of Exeter, and University College London (UCL), among others. She also previously worked for the India Meteorological Department. Apart from academia, she worked in the industry too in the UK, e.g., Risk Management Solutions and World Energy and Meteorology Council (as a Senior Scientist). In terms of teaching, she is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA), UK, and has taught in the UK (University of Exeter, UCL) and abroad (University of Oulu, Finland). Indrani is a panel member of the Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC), UK, and the Romanian National Research Council. She is a reviewer of over 40 international journals, including Nature Geoscience, Nature Communications, Scientific Reports, etc. She is also a reviewer for many grant funding bodies, viz. National Science Foundation (NSF), US, Royal Society, French National Research Agency, and NERC. She is a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society (FRMetS) and also a Trustee. She has 44 first or single-authored peer-reviewed publications on the Web of Science and many of her research is multidisciplinary in nature and addresses pressing issues of current-day science and society.