Contemporary climate change velocity for near-surface temperatures over India

Velocity of climate change (VoCC), also known as climate velocity, has been widely used as a climate change metric to inform the past and projected impacts of climate change on biodiversity globally. It is a generalized climate-landscape metric that does not involve any biological assumptions and is beneficial for regions with a lack of extensive species presence/absence data. In the current study, the contemporary (1951–2018) climate velocity for India at the annual and seasonal timescales has been assessed using observational and reanalysis datasets for mean near-surface temperature. The associated coverage uncertainty and influence of the resolutions of the datasets have been identified and an attempt has been made to address them. The central, north-western, and southern peninsular regions, along with some parts of the Indo-Gangetic plains, were identified as having experienced the highest annual climate velocities, in the range of 3–8 km/year in the last five decades. The velocities in the post-monsoon (October and November) were found to be the highest (> 4 km/year) as compared to the other seasons owing to the higher temporal, lower spatial gradients and regional dynamics. Finer resolution dataset presents a more realistic estimate of climate velocities owing to better representation of local topographical features and associated microclimate.