@article{930f59178a8348caa80c24d0c97be5de,
title = "Seven centuries of reconstructed Brahmaputra River discharge demonstrate underestimated high discharge and flood hazard frequency",
abstract = "The lower Brahmaputra River in Bangladesh and Northeast India often floods during the monsoon season, with catastrophic consequences for people throughout the region. While most climate models predict an intensified monsoon and increase in flood risk with warming, robust baseline estimates of natural climate variability in the basin are limited by the short observational record. Here we use a new seven-century (1309–2004 C.E) tree-ring reconstruction of monsoon season Brahmaputra discharge to demonstrate that the early instrumental period (1956–1986 C.E.) ranks amongst the driest of the past seven centuries (13th percentile). Further, flood hazard inferred from the recurrence frequency of high discharge years is severely underestimated by 24–38% in the instrumental record compared to previous centuries and climate model projections. A focus on only recent observations will therefore be insufficient to accurately characterise flood hazard risk in the region, both in the context of natural variability and climate change.",
author = "Rao, {Mukund P.} and Cook, {Edward R.} and Cook, {Benjamin I.} and D{\textquoteright}Arrigo, {Rosanne D.} and Palmer, {Jonathan G.} and Upmanu Lall and Woodhouse, {Connie A.} and Buckley, {Brendan M.} and Maria Uriarte and Bishop, {Daniel A.} and Jun Jian and Webster, {Peter J.}",
note = "Funding Information: M.P.R. supported by Lamont Climate Center, Lamont Chevron Student Initiative Fund, and National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Polar Programs (OPP) Arctic Social Sciences award #1737788. E.R.C. by the Lamont Climate & Life fellowship. B.I.C. supported by NASA Modeling, Analysis, and Prediction program, M.P.R., R.D.D., and B.M.B. acknowledge NSF Atmospheric & Geospace Sciences (AGS) award #1303976. D.A.B. supported by the NASA Earth and Space Science Graduate Student Fellowship #80NSSC17K0402. P.J.W. supported by NSF-AGS grant #1638256. M.P.R. thanks Naresh Devineni (CUNY-NY), Dorothy Peteet (Columbia Univ.) Nguyen Tan Thai Hung (SUTD) for helpful discussions. Authors thank Haibo Liu (Columbia Univ.) for assistance with CMIP5 data, Daniel Stahle and Nguyen Trung for helping develop the 2 Myanmar tree ring series. Lamont contribution #8443.",
year = "2020",
month = dec,
doi = "10.1038/s41467-020-19795-6",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "11",
journal = "Nature Communications",
issn = "2041-1723",
publisher = "Nature Publishing Group",
number = "1",
}