IIT Kharagpur to Set Up Climate Study Centre

To research on the impacts of climate change in the eastern regions of India, IIT Kharagpur will establish a new Centre of Excellence. The Centre will be supported by the Department of Science and Technology and it will start functioning in April 2017.

The Centre will admit around 30-35 research scholars to work on several projects. They will study the impact of climate change on land, water, atmosphere and oceans.

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Director of IIT-Kgp, Partha Pratim Chakraborty said that climate change is the biggest problem the world has been facing these days. Due to climate change, scientists feel that Southern Bengal including Kolkata will be particularly affected. Nowadays, extreme weather conditions like Tsunami and Cloudbursts are on the rise. Hence, it is very important to deal with different scenarios and study them to come up with possible solutions.

Another professor from the Department of Ocean Engineering and Naval Architecture said that IIT-Kgp will be the main coordinator of the Centre of Excellence, that is being set up with a corpus fund of INR 10 crore.

The researchers will carry out studies on different aspects of climate such as:

• Ocean acidification
• River ecosystems
• Food security
• Thunderstorm activities
• Sustainability
• Coastal processes
• Extreme water level
• Food security

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The researchers will predict various climate changes and suggest measures of coping up with them. The recent climate change has exposed the vulnerability of hinterland and coastal areas. The intensity of the cyclones has changed manifold in the past few decades. Now, the radius of cyclones has increased phenomenally as compared to what it was a few decades back.