Research led by The University of Texas at Austin is allowing for more accurate forecasts of the monsoon season further in advance.
Researchers affiliated with The University of Texas at Austin have developed a strategy that more accurately predicts seasonal rainfall over the Asian monsoon region and could provide tangible improvements to water resource management on the Indian subcontinent, impacting more than one fifth of the world’s population.
Using satellite data on the size and extent of the snow pack on the Tibetan plateau and in Siberia, the team created better climate model simulations that predict variation in monsoon rainfall the following season. The new research was published online in Environmental Research Letters.
“We are focusing on the time scale beyond the 14 days of weather forecasting to a farther, seasonal outlook,” said Peirong Lin, currently a postdoc at Princeton University who helped lead this research project while a graduate student at UT Jackson School of Geosciences. “This is a very important time scale because water resource managers need to know the forecast months prior to the monsoon onset for decisions about resources and agriculture.”
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