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Ecology & Environment
Mahesh

13/12/23 07:51 AM IST

India’s extreme rain was restricted to a ‘corridor’ during 1901-2019

In News
  • Some researchers have argued that the intense wet spells have become larger in scale, over Central India in particular.
  • The influence of the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal combine to produce dynamic conditions for generating large-scale extreme rainfall events.
Extreme rainfall
  • India’s monsoon forecasts rely heavily on its relation to the El Niño and the La Niña phenomena, although this relation holds only about 60% of the time.
  • Researchers are also continuing to search for additional process understanding, especially for the high-impact extreme rainfall events.
  • A new study has found that despite all these seemingly disparate changes in different aspects of the monsoon dynamics, a remarkable stationary element exists in terms of where the synchronised extreme rainfall events occur.
  • The so-called large-scale extreme rainfall events are actually simultaneous or near-simultaneous heavy rain episodes that are strewn across a ‘highway’ that extends from parts of West Bengal and Odisha to parts of Gujarat and Rajasthan.
  • The most remarkable new finding is that this corridor has remained unchanged from 1901 to 2019.
Findings
  • Some researchers have said that stationary elements no longer exist in climate systems because of global warming.
  • Yet the Indian monsoon continues to produce surprises in the way it is able to synchronise heavy rain events as well as stick to the ‘highway’ for such a long time.
  • The finding also suggests that, in order to improve forecasts, increasing the model resolution and the computational cost may not be necessary. Instead, the focus can be on the dynamics of synchronisation.
  • The potential for reducing risk at the smaller scale from these large-scale extreme rainfall events, for agriculture, water, energy, transportation, health, etc., is also alluring. Fortunately, India is in a solid position vis-à-vis its modelling capacity and computational resources to fully exploit this potential.
Source- The Hindu

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