Department of Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology Calicut-673601

CE4030D HYDROCLIMATOLOGY
Pre-requisites: Nil

L T P C
3 0 0 3
Total hours: 39
Course Outcomes:
The students will be able to:
CO1: Select climate variables affecting precipitation at a location.
CO2: Perform risk assessment and mapping with respect to extreme events.
CO3: Extract GCM projections and downscale these for a river basin.
CO4: Perform hydrological impact assessment of projected climate change.

Module 1: (10 hours)

Introduction to hydro-
atmosphere; vertical structure of atmosphere; radiation and temperature; laws of radiation; heat-
balance of earth atmosphere system; random temperature variation; modeling vertical variation in air
temperature; temporal variation of air temperature; temperature change in soil; thermal time and
temperature extremes.

Module 2: (10 hours)

Hydrologic cycle: introduction; global water balance; cycling of water on land, a simple water balance
model; climate variables affecting precipitation, precipitation and weather, humidity, vapor pressure,
forms of precipitation, types of precipitation; cloud; atmospheric stability; monsoon; wind pattern in
India; global wind circulation; Indian summer monsoon rainfall.

Module 3: (9 hours)
Climate variability: floods, droughts, drought indicators, heat waves, climate extremes. steps of risk
characterization - hazard identification, exposure assessment, vulnerability analysis, risk mapping,
risk characterization to natural hazards, risk assessment as a distributed process.

Module 4: (10 hours)

Climate change: introduction; causes of climate change; modeling of climate change, global climate
models, general circulation models, downscaling; IPCC scenarios; commonly used statistical methods
in hydro-climatology: trend analysis; empirical orthogonal functions, principal component analysis;
canonical correlation; statistical downscaling with regression.

References:
1. G. S. Campbell, and J. M. Norman, An Introduction to Environmental Biophysics, Springer,
2000.
2. W. M. Washington, and C. L. Parkinson, An Introduction to Three Dimensional Climate
Modeling, Oxford University Press, 2005.
3. M. L. Shelton, Hydroclimatology: Perspectives and Applications, Cambridge University Press,
2009.
4. K. McGuffie, and A. Henderson-Sellers, The Climate Modelling Primer 4th edition, Wiley
Blackwell, 2014.
5. IPCC, Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports, 2016.

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