Relationship between tropospheric temperature and Indian summer monsoon rainfall as simulated by RegCM3

Relationship between rainfall and tropospheric temperature (TT) has been examined over the Indian subcontinent during four seasons of the year using Regional Climate Model Version 3.0 (RegCM3). The model has been integrated at 55 km horizontal resolution over India during the years 1980–2000 with prescribed lateral boundary forcing from the 40 years re-analysis (ERA40) of the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts. Results of this study show that RegCM3 in general is able to capture the spatial distributions of rainfall in all the seasons as compared to the corresponding IMD0.5 gridded rainfall. The model has simulated warmer TT over the Himalayan region in all the seasons as compared to ERA40. However, it is well captured over the peninsular India and the oceanic regions. In the model, larger warming by about 0.5 °C over the northwest and Central India in the summer monsoon months might have lead to lower surface pressure there. Also, the vertical extent of the monsoon trough is found to be up to 500 hPa in the model as compared to that in NCEP/NCAR reanalysis. As a consequence, the simulated monsoon circulation and rainfall are stronger than those observed. The two most important rainfall seasons, the summer monsoon and winter are reasonably well simulated with correlation coefficients (CC) of 0.60 and 0.59 respectively significant at 99 % confidence level with the corresponding observed values of IMD0.5. Further, Indian summer monsoon rainfall (ISMR) and TT during the contrasting monsoon years are also close to their respective observed values. Temporal CCs between the TT over Tibet, Pakistan and Central India during the summer monsoon season and gridded ISMR values reveals that the TT over Pakistan has been better correlated with the ISMR than those over Tibet and Central India. This relationship has been well supported by the model simulations.