Prof. Annamali will give a presentation titled “Modeling Asian monsoon precipitation climatology: Representation of air-sea interactions over the tropical Indian Ocean”

Abstract: Forecasting monsoon rainfall using dynamical climate models has met with little success, partly due to models’ inability to represent the monsoon climatological state accurately. Relative to observations, multi-model-mean (MMM) errors for the Asian-Australian Monsoon (AAM) precipitation climatology show little improvement in the last few decades. In climate models, precipitation errors persist throughout the annual cycle, with positive (negative) errors occurring over the near-equatorial western Indian Ocean (South Asia).

The persistence of model errors over the decades suggests that they perhaps arise from multiple processes and their interactions. Here, with a focus on air-sea interactions and their impact on monsoon convection, the nature and dynamical causes of the models’ biases are investigated. We identify three key regions where realistic representations of air-sea interactions are necessary, and they are: (i) equatorial Indian Ocean (EIO); (ii) Somali-Oman and (iii) northern Bay of Bengal.

Bio: Prof. Annamalai works on understanding the processes that determine the monsoon- Indian Ocean climate systems. He applies process-based diagnostics to assess the observed and modeled monsoons across all time scales, and to identify leading processes that account for systematic errors in representing monsoon precipitation climatology in climate models.
He is a member of the international CLIVAR Monsoons Panel, and also serves as the co-Chair of the CLIVAR Asian-Australian monsoon working group.