Pakistan looks for resources to implement flood protection plan

Maha Mussadaq in the Express Tribune: Monsoon intensity in the upcoming months will be on the mild side. Areas expecting rain will not experience losses comparable to previous years, however, precautionary arrangements are being made due to unusual climate patterns worldwide.

Addressing a group of journalists at the Prime Minister’s Secretariat, National Disaster Management Authority Chairman Major General Muhammad Saeed Aleem shared national efforts for monsoon preparedness discussed with provincial governments during the recently held two-day national conference on June 30 and July 1.

According to the chairman, the meeting brought forward key issues relating to previous disasters, preparedness for the year and the future were discussed in detail. While sharing the recent Pakistan Metrological Department (PMD) seasonal report, he said the emerging climatic features linked to El Nino development have fairly large potential to suppress the Monsoon this year.

....Comparing the situation to previous years, Aleem said that last year water levels had increased in all rivers across Pakistan however the loss calculated was not as severe as 2010. He said that the region under conflict is usually not a concern during monsoon, however, plans to facilitate internally displaced persons have been discussed.

He said that for further protection, NDMA has developed a ten-year plan but for implementation of the fourth national flood protection plan, resources would be needed for successful implementation.

The National Monsoon Contingency Plan would be finalized and shared with all the stakeholders in first week of July. Moreover, request has been sent to the Pakistan Commission for Indus Water to share information with the provinces according to the treaty....

India monsoon advances as heatwave bakes north

Space Daily via AFP: India's monsoon, dubbed an "economic lifeline", advanced along the southern coast Saturday after arriving nearly a week late as a heatwave baked the north, causing blackouts in the power-starved country. As one of the world's top producers of rice, wheat and sugar, India relies heavily on the southwest monsoon which sweeps the subcontinent from June to September to water its crops.

"The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has declared the onset of the monsoon," the weather department said in a website notice Saturday. The monsoon is being watched closely amid fears weak rains could further slow an economy grappling with its worst downturn since 1985 and pose a major challenge to the newly elected right-wing government of Premier Narendra Modi.

The meteorological department has predicted below average rains with a 23 percent chance of a "deficient monsoon". Indians in southern Kerala state rejoiced as downpours eased scorching temperatures, but northern India was gripped by a heatwave with the mercury climbing as high as 48 degrees Celsius (118 degrees Fahrenheit)....

A 2009 rain in Kerala, shot by Dhruvaraj S, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

13 dead as monsoon triggers havoc in Sri Lanka capital

Space Daily via AFP: Unusually heavy monsoon rains have flooded Sri Lanka's capital and neighbouring districts where mudslides killed at least 13 people, officials said Monday.

The island's western and southern regions experienced heavy rains with more than 100 millimetres (four inches) dumped within about one hour on Sunday, an official at the Disaster Management Centre (DMC) said.

"The weather appears to be getting worse and we could have more rain in the coming days," DMC director Sarath Lal Kumara told AFP.

He said a search was underway for two people missing after a mudslide in a Colombo suburb on Sunday night. Police and DMC records showed 13 people had been killed since Sunday evening while at least another two were reported missing....

A Colombo market braced for monsoon rains in 2007, shot by McKay Savage, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Managing the monsoon

M. S. Swaminathan in the Hindu: Aberrations in monsoon behaviour are not uncommon. What is new is the difficulty in forecasting caused by factors coming under the generic title, ‘Climate change.’

Forecasts by the South Asian Climate Outlook Forum and the India Meteorological Department indicate that the south-west monsoon rainfall may be deficient. Also, there is a possibility of the evolution of an El Niño event during June to September. There is a 45 per cent probability that central, west, north-west and south India will receive below normal rainfall. There is also a 40 per cent chance that eastern States like Odisha, West Bengal, the north-east, and most of Jammu and Kashmir may get normal rains during the south-west monsoon period. Paddy arrivals in the market are also sluggish, indicating that actual production is either lower than the estimated production of 107 million tonnes of rice, or that some of the stocks is being held back in the anticipation of a higher price.

In the current scenario of climate change, predictions of extreme weather events are becoming difficult. In March-April this year, we had unexpected hailstorms and heavy rainfall in parts of central and north-west India. ... In India, unlike in the United States and Australia, agriculture is not just a food producing enterprise but also the backbone of the livelihood security of nearly 60 per cent of the population. Therefore, there is no time to relax in the area of taking anticipatory steps to safeguard food, water, energy and livelihood security in rural India, in the event of an erratic monsoon. We should initiate proactive steps immediately to ensure food and drinking water security for not only people but also for the over one billion farm animal population. Aberrations in monsoon behaviour are not uncommon, having been with us throughout our agricultural history. What is new is the difficulty in forecasting caused by factors coming under the generic title, “Climate change.”

...Right now, the government has enough stock to fulfil the legal obligation of providing 5 kg of wheat, rice or millets per month to nearly 75 per cent of our population. With one widespread drought, the current food stocks may disappear. Even this year, market arrivals of paddy have been as low as 42 per cent in West Bengal, 34 per cent in Bihar and 23 per cent in Odisha. Hence, there is no time to relax in the areas of food production and safe storage...

Monsoon flood, shot by Harsh Mangal, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr,  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Indian monsoons are becoming more extreme

Stephanie Paige Ogburn in Scientific American via ClimateWire: The Indian monsoon, a seasonal event that brings key moisture to an agricultural region where about 20 percent of the world's population resides, is getting more extreme, researchers report. A new study released yesterday in the journal Nature Climate Change found that extreme wet and dry spells within the monsoon period have increased since 1980.

"In the most fundamental sense, we are identifying climate change," said study co-author Noah Diffenbaugh, a Stanford University researcher and fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment. "The question is what is causing that climate change. It could be global warming; it could be some other forcing factors," Diffenbaugh added.

Deepti Singh, the lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate in the Environmental Earth System Science program at Stanford, said changes in the monsoon are important, because farmers there are very dependent on rain-fed agriculture for food production both nationally and for export. "So any changes and any impact on the crops locally can influence local as well as global food security," Singh said.

Although it has been previously documented that overall monsoon rainfall has lessened, few researchers have found changes in extremes. The frequency and intensity of extreme events within the monsoon are important, as periods of intense rainfall can lead to floods, while periods of extreme dryness can lead to crop failures, particularly at certain growth states when crops are particularly vulnerable...

Monsoon rains in Cherrapunjee, shot by PP Yoonus, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

African monsoon project to benefit crops and healthcare

Nick Kennedy in SciDev.net: Researchers unravelling the complexities of the West African monsoon say they are set to bring major agricultural and health benefits to people in the region — despite setbacks caused by terrorist threats and wars in the Sahel region.

The African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis (AMMA) programme, a consortium of over 400 researchers from 30 countries that was started 14 years ago, has gathered a wealth of new data about the West African monsoon from across the Sahel, and is now inspiring similar projects elsewhere in Africa.

The new dataset is enabling the researchers to improve climate prediction models for West Africa, which in turn will help to forecast farming success and disease outbreaks in the region. They are are now extending the project to coastal areas of West Africa.

Crop forecasts will be produced by the AGRHYMET (Agrometeorology, Hydrology and Meteorology) centre in Niger. The forecasts could allow the millions of people who depend on the monsoon for subsistence agriculture to make better-informed decisions.

For example, if farmers can be certain that the next season will be a drought, then they know it is not worth buying expensive fertiliser and seeds, says Richard Washington, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom.

The scientists hope that AMMA will also help forecast health risks throughout West Africa because diseases such as meningitis and malaria are influenced by the monsoon, says Doug Parker, meteorology professor at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom, and a UK coordinator for AMMA. These forecasts are now being prepared in Burkina Faso and Senegal...

Kolel Hill in Burkina Faso, shot by Marco Schmidt, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Floods force thousands to evacuate in Indonesian capital

Kanupriya Kapoor in Reuters: Monsoon rains have inundated parts of the Indonesian capital, forcing more than 30,000 people to evacuate and posing a challenge for its wildly popular governor, Joko Widodo, a possible presidential candidate. Soldiers were deployed to help nearly 50,000 residents in the sprawling city of 10 million people, as floodwaters reached three meters (9.8 ft) in some districts, the National Disaster Mitigation Agency said.

Last year's rainy season brought Jakarta to a standstill, causing a river in the city to breach its banks and swamp the central business district, leaving thousands stranded and causing $580 million in damage to property and companies.

Heavy rains are forecast this week, potentially worsening floods which have killed seven people, mostly from electrocution, and forced thousands to seek refuge at temporary shelters, including schools and mosques.

Jokowi, as the governor is known locally, came to office in late 2012 with promises to improve the city's creaky infrastructure, strained by chronic floods and traffic. The presidential favorite has since launched a number of initiatives to alleviate flooding, including clearing riverbanks of illegal housing and rubbish, and creating more green spaces and drainage to absorb rainwater.

But until those efforts show results, he could face criticism over flood management, especially if the waters rise and more districts are affected. The floods have already caused about $80 million in damage, said the Disaster Mitigation Agency...

A car during a January 2013 flood in Jakarta, VOA Indonesian Service

Monsoon to get longer in India: IPCC

The Economic Times (India): North India is likely to heat up more than the southern parts of the country while the entire Indian subcontinent may see longer rainy seasons in second half of the century, the UN's climate body has predicted in its latest comprehensive document on climate change.

The conclusion, showing variation in temperature and rainfall in South Asia, is part of the lengthy technical details of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which made its comprehensive report — Climate Change 2013, The Physical Science Basis — public in Stockholm on Monday.

The findings of the report show that the northern part of the continent is likely to witness winter temperatures rise of up to 0.4 to 0.8 degree Celsius during 2016-35 as compared to the 1986-2005 average, 2 to 3 degree Celsius during 2046-65 and up to 3 to 5 degree Celsius by the end of the century (2081-2100), under different scenarios of action to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Though the UN body's report on region-wise "impact, adaptation and vulnerability" will come out in March next year, the technical details comprising 14 chapters and Atlas of Global and Regional Climate Projections in its annexure carry indications of these changes in South Asia....

Shot by RMehra, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Air pollution set to influence Asian monsoon

Smriti Mallapaty in SciDev.net: Increased air pollution before and during the Asian summer monsoon will change rainfall patterns across Asia, as well as the regional and global climate, a gathering of atmospheric scientists in Nepal has heard. But the effect must be quantified with further research, said researchers at the Workshop on Atmospheric Composition and the Asian Summer Monsoon, hosted by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), last month (9-12 June).

"The monsoon itself [which roughly runs from May to October] is highly complex, and pollution is highly complex. With that combination, we need a lot more observations and modelling to say exactly what will happen," Mark Lawrence, a participant in the workshop and scientific director at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Germany, told SciDev.Net in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Rapid industrial development and population growth in Asia have led to increased emissions of a range of pollutants, including gases such as carbon monoxide, and aerosols such as black carbon and other dust particles. These emissions are pumped through monsoon systems that act as chimneys into higher levels of the atmosphere, where they form an 'anticyclone' — a large circulation of winds moving away from a central eye — over the Tibetan plateau.

“Monsoons and pollution are highly complex. With that combination, we need a lot more observations to say what will happen” Mark Lawrence Some of the emissions travel even higher, into the atmospheric layer known as the stratosphere, staying for a long time and affecting radiation and climate, says Laura Pan, atmospheric scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, a co-organiser of the workshop.

Increased particle emissions during or before the Asian summer monsoon are also expected to affect cloud and rainfall patterns. Smoke or dust in the air act as 'seeds' on which water drops form to make clouds, says ICIMOD's lead atmospheric scientist, Arnico Panday. The more particles in the atmosphere, the more water vapour spreads out and the longer it takes to rain — the same way mist on a shower curtain only drips down when large enough droplets form...

Monsoon in Mumbai, shot by Jaxer, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Climate change may be making children sick in Pakistan

M. Wagar Bhatti in the News (Pakistan): Cases of vector-borne diseases have increased rapidly in the country this year, particularly in Sindh, and experts have linked this phenomenon to the irregular rain patterns “This year, the rise in vector-borne diseases including diarrhoea, cholera, gastroenteritis, typhoid, and hepatitis is due to environmental factors and the effects of climate change,” says Dr Iqbal Memon, renowned paediatrician and president of the Pakistan Paediatric Association.

Monsoon season in Pakistan normally starts in the middle of July and continues till mid-September and in the monsoon season, the consumption of contaminated water from freshwater sources caused outbreaks of water-borne diseases, especially in the rural areas of Sindh.

“But we are seeing a rise in the cases if diarrhoea, cholera, gastroenteritis and typhoid cases, which shows that safe drinking water is unavailable in our freshwater sources, which was not the case in the past,” explains Dr Memon. He adds that thousands of children have been diagnosed with vector-borne diseases in Sindh during the last couple of months.

A few decades back, Dr Memon recalls, the Indus River used to flow at full strength prior to the monsoon season in the country and freshwater was abundantly available to local communities during all seasons.

“Now there is no water in the Indus River. Ponds and riverines in Sindh have become contaminated, but people have no other option but to use that water for drinking and cooking. This lack of freshwater is purely due to environmental reasons.”...

The Indus River in Hyderabad, shot by Farhan, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

India predicted to receive normal monsoon rains

Seed Daily via AFP: India will receive normal monsoon rains this year, the government said on Friday, boosting prospects of a stronger performance this year by Asia's third-largest economy. The pounding rains that sweep across the continent from June to September are dubbed the "economic lifeline" of India, which is one of the world's leading producers of rice, sugar, wheat and cotton.

"The southwest monsoon rainfall for the country is most likely to be normal," said Science Minister S. Jaipal Reddy. "The monsoon rainfall is likely to be 98 percent with a margin of error of five percent," he added.

But monsoon rains in the southern states of Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu may be delayed or could be below normal levels, government officials said. More than 70 percent of Indians depend on farm incomes, and at least 60 percent of the nation's farms lack irrigation, meaning they depend entirely on the rains that fall in intense bursts over the wet season...

View of Kalpa Village and Kinnaur Kailash blocked by monsoons, shot by Honinbou, Wikimedia Commons,  under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

The Asian monsoon is getting predictable

Robert Monroe at the UC San Diego News Center: For much of Asia, the pace of life is tuned to rhythms of monsoons. The summer rainy season is especially important for securing the water and food supplies for more than a billion people. Its variations can mean the difference between drought and flood. Now a Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego-led study reports on a crucial connection that could drastically improve the ability of forecasters to reliably predict the monsoon a few months in advance.

Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie from Scripps and colleagues from NOAA found that a winter appearance of the climate phenomenon called El Niño in the Pacific Ocean can leave its mark on monsoon formation in the Indian Ocean a full six months later. In between is an atmospheric phenomenon called the Pacific-Japan pattern that provides the teleconnection between the two ocean basins and further poleward to East Asia.

“It has long been a mystery that climate anomalies in the region correlate better with El Niño in the preceding winter than with the one developing in the concurrent summer,” said Xie, a climate scientist and inaugural holder of the Scripps Roger Revelle Chair in Environmental Science. “The new paper shows that Indian Ocean temperature and atmospheric anomalies in the western Pacific are physically coupled, and their interactions amplify each other. We demonstrated that this new mode of coupled ocean-atmospheric anomalies is predictable a season ahead. Such predictions have tremendous benefits to society.”

... “The last sound El Niño makes is in the western Pacific Ocean,” Kosaka said, “because the positive feedback between the Indian Ocean and Pacific-Japan pattern we found amplifies climate anomalies in this region.” The last echoes of El Niño have devastating consequences to the region....

Researchers studied anomalies of observed (a) and modeled (c) Indian Ocean sea-surface temperatures as well as observed (b) and modeled (d) precipitation patterns to establish a link between El Niño and the Asian monsoon. Image by PNAS.

What happens in Nepal doesn’t stay in Nepal

Shabbir Mir in the Express Tribune (Pakistan): Life had been good for Sunyali Majhi, a farmer in Dolalghat, a small village about 50 kilometres from landlocked Nepal’s Kathmandu. She harvested enough rice to sell and feed her brood at home. But the portions have been getting smaller, the financial squeeze tighter.

...“Over the last decade or so, rainfall has become increasingly unpredictable,” she explains, estimating a 40 per cent drop in what the earth produced. The vagaries of Nature were to blame. “When the crops needed water, it did not rain… and then suddenly it rained cats and dogs.” This erratic behaviour slowly eroded farmer confidence. Like Sunyali, a vast majority of Nepali women making a living from the land in the landlocked country of 30 million people.

Over the last few years, Nepal has been seeing more and more extreme temperatures as weather patterns have grown unpredictable. Winters are drier and summer monsoons more delayed. For years, the farmers have lived in harmony with nature in the mountainous villages. And while they may not have necessarily contributed much to climate change, they are certainly feeling its effects now.

.... “There is no doubt there’s been a change in rainfall patterns in Nepal over the past 30 years or so,” says Dr Bed Mani of the department of Environmental Sciences at Kathmandu University. “The volume of precipitation in a year is the same but the duration of such events has changed,” he explains. “It now rains at lesser intervals but with more intensity.” Farming in Nepal largely relies on monsoon rainfall because the irrigation system covers only a small area of the country.

Inconsistent rainfall and changes in climate are having an impact not just in Nepal but throughout the Himalayan region. Similar events are already taking place in Pakistan. Professor Ahmed Nafees at Karakoram International University says that the mountainous regions are more likely to be affected by the growing intensity in rainfall as this often triggers landslides and avalanches. “Deforestation is a constant problem in the mountainous regions and when there is a heavy downpour there is nothing to hold the soil,” says Nafees. “It results in death and destruction.”....

Wind erosion in Kalopani, Nepal, shot by Till Niermann, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Atlantic warming points to malaria risk... in India

Terra Daily via (AFP): Health watchdogs monitoring the risk of malaria in India should keep a close eye on what's happening thousands of kilometres (miles) away in the Atlantic, an unusual study published on Sunday suggests. The temperature of the sea surface in the tropical South Atlantic is a big determinant for levels of monsoon rain, which in turn is the big factor for malarial mosquitoes, it says.

Researchers led by Mercedes Pascual at the University of Michigan compared maps of monsoon rainfall and malaria epidemics in the desert fringe of northwestern India with a global map of sea-surface temperatures.

What struck them was a clear link between abnormally cold temperatures in the tropical South Atlantic in July and a regional increase in malaria in the ensuing September-December period. Previous research has suggested that the vast body of water in the Atlantic has a much bigger impact on the global climate system than thought.

When this volume of ocean warms or cools, it has a knock-on effect on adjoining seas. The transfer of heat has an impact on ocean circulation and rainfall, affecting for instance the relationship between the monsoon of the Indian Ocean and El Nino, the pendulum weather swing in the Pacific....

Histopathology of malaria exoerythrocytic forms in liver. Histopathology of malaria exoerythrocytic forms in liver. Parasite. Content Providers(s): CDC/Dr. Melvin Creation Date: 1973

Nepali farmers abandon rice as monsoon shifts

Saleem Shaikh and Sughra Tunio in AlertNet: For most of his adult life, Bidur Basnet has planted paddy rice each monsoon season on his five hectares of mountain land. But in the last five years, as monsoon rains have grown increasingly unreliable, he has had to abandon the country’s staple crop. Now he grows easier-to-water vegetables on half his land, leaving the other half fallow.

“How can we prepare our paddy fields when we do not know which month in any year the monsoon rains will drench our fields?” grumbles Basnet, 43, who gave up rice farming after seeing his harvests fall by a third. “Sometimes the monsoon rain is on time and sometimes it is delayed. Such unpredictability is really confounding for us.”

With rains that used to come in April now shifting as late as mid-June, vegetables, which can be watered by hand if needed or planted at the time rains finally fall, are now a better bet, he says.

“Growing cash crops like potato, garlic and onion that require much less water as compared to paddy and have ready buyers in the local market has been a source of secure, constant income for our household,” Bidur told AlertNet Climate.

Battered by growing rainfall variability and unpredictable weather, Nepal’s rice farmers are looking for alternatives, including new crops....

Drying rice in Nepal, shot by Markrosenrosen, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Prediction of monsoon rainfall activity close at hand

Terra Daily via SPX: The amount of rainfall and number of tropical storms during the summer monsoon season greatly impact the agriculture, economy, and people in Asia. Though meteorologists and climate scientists have worked for years to develop helpful prediction systems, seasonal predictions of these two types of weather phenomena are still poor.

Scientists working at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, have now made a promising breakthrough for predicting in spring both the summer monsoon rainfall over East Asia and the number of tropical storms affecting East Asian coastal areas. The study is published in the January 21, 2013, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The scientists have shown that both the East Asian summer monsoon and the storm activity in the western North Pacific are controlled by fluctuations in the western Pacific Subtropical High (WPSH), a major atmospheric circulation system in the global subtropics centered over the Philippine Sea.

When this system is strong in summer, then monsoon rainfall tends to be greater than normal over East Asia, and in the western North Pacific there tend to be fewer tropical storms that make landfall.

With the help of computer modeling experiments, the scientists found that these summer fluctuations in the WPSH are more than 65% predictable in spring. When the Indo-Pacific warm pool shows a dipolar sea surface temperature anomaly (that is, an unusually warm Indian Ocean together with an unusually cool western North Pacific) or the central Pacific tends to cool in spring, then the WPSH will be strong and stable with ensuing greater summer monsoon rainfall over the East Asian monsoon front and the Ganges River Valley in India, but fewer tropical storms will affect East Asian coastal areas and the western subtropical Pacific....

Monsoon rains in Punjab, shot by Sanyambahga, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Indian monsoons may fail due to climate change

Zee News: Global warming caused by extensive human interference in the environment will likely result in failure of Indian monsoon in the next 200 years threatening food supplies, a new study has warned. The study suggests that increased human activity like burning of fossil fuels and related shifts in tropical air flows, which has lead to drastic climate change, could result in collapse of monsoon rains about every fifth year between 2150 and 2200.

India being an agrarian society entirely depends on the monsoons, which lasts from June to September. India last faced a severe widespread drought in 2009 and had to import sugar, pushing global prices to a 30-year high.

The researchers defined monsoon "failure" as a fall in rainfall (between 40 and 70 percent) below normal levels. Such a drastic decline has not happened any year in records dating back to 1870 by the India Meteorological Department, they said.

"Monsoon failure becomes much more frequent" as temperatures rise, Anders Levermann, a professor of dynamics of the climate system and one of the authors at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, was quoted as saying by a news agency.  "In the past century, the Indian monsoon has been very stable. It is already a catastrophe with 10 percent less rain than the average," Levermann said....

Monsoon floods in Ambala, shot by Harsh Mangal, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Rifts emerge over why Arabian cyclones are strengthening

Rasha Dewedar in SciDev.net: People living in countries around the Arabian Sea have been exposed to tropical cyclones that have been growing in strength since 1997, and hitting the area earlier than usual — but scientists are still debating what is driving these changes. A study published in Nature last month (20 September) challenges previous conclusions that the stronger cyclones are being driven by man-made pollution, such as aerosol and sulphate emissions.

Instead, it claims, the stronger cyclones are caused by an earlier onset of the Asian summer monsoon, which in turn may be driven by natural variation or man-made warming. But the authors of the original paper, published in Nature in November 2011, reject the new findings and maintain that pollution is the fundamental cause.

Over the past 60 years, the Arabian Sea has been exposed to huge growth in emissions from the Indian subcontinent. The 2011 study, led by Amato Evan, an assistant professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, United States, attributed the intensification of tropical cyclones since 1997 to this simultaneous upward trend in black carbon and sulphate emissions.

But Bin Wang, chair of the meteorology department at the University of Hawaii's International Pacific Research Center, United States, and collaborators in China, instead attribute the increase to the early onset of the Asian summer monsoon....

You might expect to see a storm with near-perfect symmetry and a well-defined eye hoovering over the warm waters of the Caribbean or in the South Pacific, but Tropical Cyclone Gonu showed up in an unusual place. On June 4, 2007, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image, Tropical Cyclone Gonu was approaching the northeastern shore of Oman, a region better known for hot desert conditions. From NASA

Bangladesh experts fear climate change link to erratic rainfall pattern

The Financial Express (Bangladesh): Despite intense rainfall within a short span of time in the total quantum of downpour appeared much less than the usual in the past several years, a phenomenon which experts feared is a backlash of change of global climate pattern, reports BSS.

Weather and climate experts said impact of climate change could be manifested in the form of temperature extremes and frequent floods, droughts and cyclones. But in Bangladesh the data of rainfall, a crucial climate change indicator, showed the region appeared a victim of the phenomenon.

"We earlier saw protracted monsoon downpour for three or four consecutive days but the trend disappeared now, intense rainfall in a short period of time triggers flash floods nowadays," Professor Umme Kulsum Navera of Department of Water Resources Engineering of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) told the news agency.

Meteorologists said they recorded 47,447milimetres rainfall in June, July, August and September in 2010, which was less compared to the average of the last 15 years. The country experienced less rainfall in the last year, Meteorologist SM Quamrul Hassan said adding that ten per cent less rainfall was recorded from June to September this year....

Climate change: monsoon season likely to be delayed by 2-3 weeks annually: expert

Business Recorder: Rapid climate change is likely to delay monsoon season for 2-3 weeks annually across the globe, Dr Moetasim Ashfaq, Computational Climate Scientist, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA said here on Monday. He was delivering a special lecture on "South Asian Summer Monsoon in 21st Century" organised by Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI).

He said that high resolution climate models used at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA have predicted weakening of summer monsoon precipitation over South Asia towards the end of 21st century. Dr Qamar uz Zaman Chaudhry, Advisor Climate Affairs, was also present on the occasion.

Monsoon is traditionally defined as a seasonal reversing of the wind accompanied by corresponding changes in precipitation, but is now used to describe seasonal changes in atmospheric circulation and precipitation associated with the asymmetric heating of land and sea. The vagaries of South Asian summer monsoon rainfall on short and long time scales impact the lives of more than one billion people while due to the rapid climate change, the glaciers in Pakistan are receding at a rate of almost 40-60 meters per decade posing threat to the region.

In his lecture, Dr Moetasim, discussed simulation and projection of South Asian summer monsoon. He also showed reservations on projections of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and said, there is a large uncertainty in projections of IPCC report based on multi Global Climate Models (GCM). Global models featured in IPCC report can resolve large-scale interactions, but have limitations while capturing atmospheric processes at regional level, he added. He also informed that simulations run in their model show an eastward shift in monsoon circulation, which would mean more rainfall over the eastern parts of South Asia....

Monsoon lightning in Cherukunna, shot by Prakashkpc, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license