According to a 2021 study, the Indian subcontinent should expect 5.3% greater monsoon precipitation for each additional degree Celsius of global temperature change. Warmer atmospheres can contain more moisture, whereas warmer oceans allow more water to evaporate. And this extra rain appears to be thrown all at once rather than equally distributed. “You frequently get droughts and floods in the same place in the same season now,” says Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, India.
The places where it rains the most and least are also shifting. Some agricultural regions in north-central India are becoming drier, while other sections of the country are becoming wetter.
A thunderclap awakened your correspondent up early on June 28th. The other side of the roadway was hidden by a wall of water; the monsoon had arrived in Delhi. By the end of the day, India’s capital had received 230 millimeters of rain, three times the typical amount for the entire month of June, making it the rainiest 24 hours since 1966.
People of India and South Asia may likely expect more days like this. Since the middle of the twentieth century, the number of “extreme rain days” (defined as more than 150 mm of precipitation in 24 hours) in India has increased. Global warming appears to be increasing monsoon variability. And as temperatures rise, the monsoon’s extremes may become more devastating.Â
Unpredictability is bad news for India’s crops, 60% of which rely solely on rainfall. Monsoon patterns influence when farmers choose to sow and harvest their crops; last year, for example, a slow start to the monsoon delayed the sowing season in some areas. Forecasters have improved their ability to predict national and regional monsoon trends over the last decade, according to Yogesh Patil of Skymet, a Mumbai-based forecasting company. However, local forecasts continue to fail. Nobody predicted the magnitude of the rainfall in Delhi, or the more recent huge downpour in Mumbai.
Source:Economist
Photo Credit: India Today
