India floods: Unusual weather systems clash was trigger

Navin Singh Khadka in BBC: An unusually intensive fusion of two weather systems from opposite directions triggered this week's devastating floods in northern India and western Nepal, authorities have said. They say the monsoon advancing towards the west of South Asia combined with westerly winds for an unusually long time and with an extraordinary intensity, which resulted in days of torrential rains.

Weather authorities in India and Pakistan have warned there is still a threat that the dangerous combination will cause more devastating floods.

At least 560 people are known to have been killed and thousands are missing in northern India. The death toll is expected to rise further. The worst-affected areas are in India's Uttarakhand state, where floods have flattened homes and swept away roads and bridges.

More than 40,000 people, many of them Hindu pilgrims, are still stranded in what the government has described as a "national crisis."...

Aerial view of Haridwar, Ganga Arti, in Uttarakhand, shot by Prashant Chauhan, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license