CRC Press Natural Decadal Climate Variability: Societal Impacts (Drought and Water Crises)

Natural Decadal Climate Variability: Societal Impacts is an important work for understanding the natural decadal climate variability (DCV), a phenomenon which has made long lasting impacts on civilizations, especially on water availability and agriculture. This book comprehensively covers multiyear to  decadal  variations  in instrument measured precipitation and temperature, water availability and river flows, crop production, agricultural irrigation, inland water-borne transportation, hydroelectricity generation, and fish and crustacean captures since the 1960s. A longer term perspective is provided with the use of multi-century data on dry and wet epochs based on tree ring information, and corroborating evidence from other literature. This valuable work will benefit climate scientists, meteorologists, hydrologists, agronomists, water transportation planners, resource economists, policymakers, professors, and graduate students and anyone else who has an interest in learning how natural climate phenomena has influenced societies for at least the past 1000 years. Review "This is an exceptionally well thought out book on a vitally important, but largely overlooked aspect of climate change science on the near term implications of decadal climate variability (DCV). Not only does Dr. Mehta fill an absolutely critical void in climate science documentation by comprehensively inventorying and describing multi-year to decadal variations in precipitation and temperature, he goes a step further by doing a masterful job of sorting through the chaotic accumulation of previous climate variability research to clearly describe how the impacts of DCV’s affect water security and the stability of civil societies across the mega-nexus of water availability, agricultural production, energy, water transportation, and the sustainability of natural resources." ―Robert A. Pietrowsky, Director, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Institute for Water Resources and the International Center for Integrated Water Resources Management, under the auspices of UNESCO, Alexandria, Virginia, USA "This is an informative book on multiyear to decadal scale climatic variations and their impacts on precipitation, water availability, crop production, water transportation, fish catch, economy and society. The author has provided a good overview and discussion on the phenomenon of natural decadal scale climate variability and its hydrological impacts over different regions of the globe, which would be of interest to meteorologists, hydrologists, agriculture scientists, climate and application scientists, graduate students, social scientists and policymakers."― Krishnan Raghavan, Director, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, India "This book admirably fills a yawning gap in the climate literature. There has been almost nothing before on the essential topic of decadal climate variations and their impact on society. Amidst the justifiable concern with Global Warming it is a welcome reminder that the climate changes that have impacted peop About the Author Dr. Vikram Mehta earned his M.Sc. in Physics in 1977 and post-graduate diploma in space sciences and their applications in 1979 from Gujarat University, Ahmedabad, India. He then became an Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Research Fellow at the Space Applications Centre, ISRO, Ahmedabad, India from 1979 to 1982, working on microwave remote sensing. He studied upper atmospheric physics at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, from 1982 to 1984, earning a post-graduate diploma in physics. A strong interest in more application-oriented scientific research led him to the Department of Meteorology at the Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, where he earned his M.S. in 1986 and Ph.D. in meteorology in 1990. After his Ph.D. work on natural decadal climate variability (DCV), Vikram was a research scientist from 1990 to 2002 at the National Aeronautics and S