Assessment of climate warming in the Western Ghats of India in the past century using geothermal records
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Assessment of climate warming in the Western Ghats of India in the past century using geothermal records Srinidhi Jha 1 & Birendra Bharti 2 & Dontireddy Venkat Reddy 3 & Pragya Shahdeo 4 & Jew Das 1 Received: 4 October 2018 / Accepted: 8 July 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Temperature-depth profiles of boreholes of a region can be analysed to estimate the past variations in climate. Perturbations over the surface ground temperature are imparted deep into the Earth’s subsurface. Western Ghats regions of India are considered to be one of the most ecologically rich regions and also play a crucial role in deciding the climatological characteristics of the country. This study quantifies the possible climate warming or cooling in the past century in the Western Ghats using temperature-depth profiles of five boreholes in a depth range of 140–198 m located in Koyna region (17.38° N, 73.74° E) of Maharashtra state, India. The analysis shows that there has been a significant warming of 0.8 ± 0.2 °C over the past 100 years in the region. The inferred warming is comparable with the trends of meteorological records of the area which yields an increasing trend of 0.56 °C in the surface air temperature (SAT). For further validation of results, a combined study of borehole temperature profiles and surface air temperature (SAT) profiles was done which showed that the period was warmer than the earlier long-term temperature records of the region by 0.8 °C. This pre-observational mean (POM) value seems to be consistent with previously studied POMs over India. This study provides a ‘true estimate’ of climate change and can be used as a robust technique to reconstruct the past climate warming.
1 Introduction Climate change is a very complex phenomenon and so is its detection. Right from the beginning of the Earth, the only driving mechanism behind the evolution of life and life-sustaining environment has been calculated variations in the planet’s climate. To actually estimate the forthcoming events and their positive or negative impacts on the ecosystem, we need to trace the path of past perturbations in climate variables accurately. From the past century or so, with the availability of spatiotemporally larger data sets, researchers have been able to estimate the warming or cooling of Earth’s atmosphere. Earlier approaches to
* Srinidhi Jha [email protected] 1
Discipline of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Indore, Indore, India
2
Center for Water Engineering and Management, Central University of Jharkhand, Ranchi, India
3
CSIR-National Geophysical Research Institute, Hyderabad, India
4
Vignan Institute of Technology and Science, Hyderabad, India
climate change studies were aimed at examining the longterm surface air temperature (SAT) records (Hansen and Lebedeff 1987). With the advancement of technology, new methods were explored and employed to estimate the historical climate warming. There is a general consensus among researchers that climate chan
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