2011 Theses Doctoral

Essays in Climatic Extremes, Agriculture and Natural Resources

Bangalore Krishnamurthy, Chandra Kiran

The first part of this dissertation attempts to add to our understanding of two aspects of the climate change issue, using tools from two different disciplines: Economics and Hydro-Climatology, for the case of India. The two aspects addressed are :( 1) understanding and summarizing changes in the climate system (and systems driven by it, such as the hydrologic system) and (2) translating such an understanding into quantitative assessments of impacts upon different activities. Modifications of conventional approaches in Environmental Economics are used to obtain a quantitative understanding of the type of changes in agricultural productivity induced by probable scenarios of climate change. Using a newly available observational rainfall data set from the Meteorological Department, assessments are carried out of changes in extremes of rainfall. These putative changes are then assessed in relation to certain larger scale climatological phenomena which presumably impact hydrologic extremes, based on hypotheses presented in the literature. The second part of the dissertation addresses the issue of unified, coherent and more realistic analysis of groundwater-based models in the Economics literature.