ANNOUNCEMENTS
Atmospheric aerosols are known to have significant impact on various facets of human life like changing climate, air quality and health. Climate over the Central Indian region encompassing the state of Madhya Pradesh is considered representative of whole India as several meteorological parameters show significant homogeneity within this region correlated to a large extent with other regions (an example being the Indian Summer Monsoon Rainfall). Recent studies show that aerosol loading is increasing over this region attributable to various anthropogenic and natural causes. In this thesis, we explore the climatology, trends and interrelationship between each other with specific focus on aerosol and fire counts using more than 20 years of gridded satellite datasets to explore this change in relation to change in meteorology and fire emissions. It is found that aerosol loading has increased by 47% during this period. While rainfall remained more or less stable, changes were observed in temperature (- 1.92°), NDVI (+33.33%), Fire counts (+755.68%) etc. Aerosols and surface temperature (-0.71), precipitation (+0.45), Fire counts (-0.08) were respectively correlated. The differing nature of seasonality in trends of fires and aerosol loading reveals that fire occurrence and their increase in recent times could not have been the primary reason for increased aerosol loading over central India. In addition, increased rainfall over this region further shows that increasing aerosols may be a result of potentially a strong source outside the current domain of our interest or are a result of emissions mostly confined to rain-free periods such as winter pointing to an anthropogenic origin. Overall, the aerosol loading also appears to be cooling the region on an annual basis.
Keywords- Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD), Surface Temperature, Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Fire Count, Precipitation.
