Mahendra Nimmakanti
Postdoctoral Research Scientist, Conceptual Investigations Unit
Mahendra Nimmakanti is a Postdoctoral Research Scientist working with the Conceptual Investigations Unit and a climate scientist studying monsoon dynamics and climate variability at the Indian Institute of Science and Stanford University.
Background
Mahendra Nimmakanti is a Project Scientist at the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (CAOS) of the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, and a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Earth System Science at Stanford University. He holds a Ph.D. in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences from the National Institute of Technology Rourkela. His research addresses the dynamics and variability of the Indian summer monsoon — including ENSO and remote-ocean teleconnections, monsoon depressions, extreme rainfall, and the ways in which climate models do and do not reproduce observed monsoon trends.
Selected scientific contributions
Climate-model representation of the monsoon
- Evidence that a missing summer westerly-jet "barotropic governor" effect, tied to North Atlantic sea-surface-temperature change, explains discrepancies between climate models and observations in recent Indian monsoon rainfall trends (Mahendra et al., 2026).
- An analysis of how the interannual ENSO–Indian summer monsoon rainfall teleconnection is modulated on interdecadal timescales, and of the regional patterns this produces in observations and CMIP6 models (Mahendra et al., 2021).
ENSO–monsoon teleconnections
- A comparison of the contrasting influence of the 1997 and 2015 El Niño events on Indian summer monsoon rainfall, highlighting the role of the Southern Hemisphere (Mahendra et al., 2024).
- A case study of the deviant El Niño influence on the 2023 monsoon, involving the Indian Ocean Dipole, the Madden–Julian Oscillation, and equivalent-barotropic Rossby waves (Mahendra et al., 2024).
Monsoon depressions and changing rainfall
- Evidence for a strong east–west gradient in monsoon precipitation change over Northern India in recent decades (Kumari et al., 2025).
- An analysis linking increased summer monsoon rainfall over Northwest India to warming of the northwestern Arabian Sea, modulated by the Silk Road Pattern since 2000 (Mahendra et al., 2024).
- A finding that the occurrence of summer monsoon depressions over the northern Arabian Sea has roughly doubled in the past two decades (Chilukoti et al., 2024).
- An examination of the anomalous 2020 Indian summer monsoon and the role of barotropic Rossby waves and monsoon depressions (Mahendra et al., 2023).
Extreme rainfall events
- An account of how a stagnation of atmospheric circulation produced a historically prolonged extreme-rainfall event over northwestern India in August 2024 (Mahendra et al., 2025).