Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee have developed and released INDRA-CMIP6, an open-access, high-resolution climate projection dataset designed to sharpen India's regional climate adaptation, disaster preparedness, and climate risk assessment. The dataset, published in Nature Portfolio's Scientific Data, provides daily rainfall and temperature projections for the Indian subcontinent at a spatial resolution of approximately 10 kilometres.

What INDRA-CMIP6 Contains

The dataset delivers daily projections of precipitation, minimum temperature, and maximum temperature at a 0.1° × 0.1° grid resolution. Crucially, researchers have provided both individual outputs from 14 CMIP6 global climate models and a multi-model ensemble, enabling planners and scientists to compare projections and quantify uncertainty rather than depending on a single climate pathway.

The data was generated using a statistical downscaling technique called Double Bias-Corrected Constructed Analogue (DBCCA), which the team says improves the representation of daily weather variability, regional rainfall distribution, and temperature extremes across the subcontinent.

Why Existing Global Models Fall Short

Conventional global climate models operate at coarse spatial scales that routinely fail to capture India's complex terrain, monsoon dynamics, and localised weather extremes. According to the researchers, adaptation decisions — including urban drainage planning, embankment strengthening, flood preparedness, and climate-resilient agriculture — require projections at the district and river-basin level, not broad continental averages. INDRA-CMIP6 is explicitly designed to fill that gap.

Technical Validation and Key Improvements

Technical validation conducted by the IIT Roorkee Department of Hydrology team showed that INDRA-CMIP6 significantly reduces the systematic errors commonly found in raw global model outputs. The dataset also improves simulation of extreme rainfall events and temperature extremes — variables that are especially critical for regions where local topography, monsoon behaviour, and geography drive the highest climate risks.

Context: India's Growing Climate Vulnerability

The release comes as India faces intensifying climate impacts, including rising temperatures, erratic monsoon patterns, urban flooding, heat stress, and mounting pressure on water resources. This is precisely the kind of infrastructure — granular, validated, openly accessible — that state governments, disaster management authorities, and urban planners have repeatedly cited as a gap in their preparedness toolkit. With the dataset now publicly available, the next test is whether institutional capacity exists to translate 10-km projections into actionable local policy.