Bhoo-Mandal Talk on August 14, 2020
Talk title: Understanding and Predicting the Monsoons
Speaker: Prof. Ravi Nanjundiah, Director, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune (IITM Pune); and Professor, the Center for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and Divecha Centre for Climate Change, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru
Time: August 14, 2020, 6:00 pm IST.
Venue: [Virtual talk] IEEE Webex
Abstract:
The monsoon governs the pulse of our country affecting every aspect of our life. We will begin with a bird’s eye view of the monsoons – starting from its cause, its variability on sub-seasonal and inter-annual scales Also we will look at external factors that influence the monsoons viz. El Nino and the Indian Ocean teleconnections. We will take a quick overview of how weather and climate are predicted, including the equations used, the discretization techniques to solve them, the creation of initial conditions, and the use of high-performance computing (HPC) for this purpose. We will also discuss briefly how monsoons are forecast and what these forecasts behold for this year. This will be followed by a brief discussion on the application of AI/ML to Monsoon Prediction.
Speaker biography: Ravi Nanjundiah has worked on Monsoons and its variability. His interests include the study of monsoons, application of HPC to climate models, use of AI/ML to climate studies. He is currently the Director of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune since 2017. He is the Mission Director of the Monsoon Mission under the Government of India – a programme dedicated to improving Monsoon forecasts at all scales.
He is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the India Meteorological Society, Adjunct Professor of TIFR, and Professor at Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences & Divecha Centre for Climate Change, IISc, Bengaluru. He did his Ph.D. (Atmospheric Science) and ME (Mechanical) from IISc, Bengaluru, and BE (Mechanical) from Rani Durgavati Univ., Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh. He worked as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory, USA. His work on the application of parallel computing to Climate Modelling was the first of its kind in the country and one of the first few in the world (in 1988). He has been awarded the NVIDIA Innovation Award (2013) for use of Grid Computing to Climate Modelling and the C. V. Raman Young Scientist Award in the field of Earth Sciences by the Govt. of Karnataka. He has guided 15 Ph.D. and 10 Masters’ thesis and published about 90 peer-reviewed publications.