12/23/2023 0 Comments Monsoon weather calculatorSince India was economically important and absorbed a fifth of all British exports, a countrywide estimate on whether the monsoon would succeed or fail was adequate. This didn’t matter to the colonial weather establishment, which had been set up around the time of a series of droughts in the late 1800s, collectively known as the late Victorian holocausts. The problem is that these global linkages can say almost nothing at scales below the size of a country. India has used these large-scale global linkages, known as “teleconnections", to make predictions about the upcoming monsoon ever since. The 1888 drought, in particular, which struck India and Australia at the same time, eventually established a relationship between warmer sea surface temperature in the Pacific Ocean (also known as El Nino) and rainfall failures across the southern hemisphere. In the late-1800s and early 1900s, British meteorologists, exploiting the empire’s extensive geographic coverage, started noticing that several parts of the world experienced drought at the same time. Then, make a scatter plot and whatever relationship is there, you presume it will happen in the future as well." “You compare past rainfall data with, say, sea surface temperature. Until 2016, India’s monsoon forecasting system was driven entirely by statistical methods which tried to draw past correlation between monsoon rains and large-scale global phenomena, like the El Nino, and projected that into the present. In response, the Indian weather establishment, which has been heavily influenced by mechanisms put in place by the British, is finally shifting gears slowly. Past experience is proving to be unreliable because the monsoon is undergoing fundamental shifts since the mid-1970s, resulting in a dramatic rise in the numbers of days of excess rain as well as no rain in certain regions, particularly central India. The result is that while the regularity of the monsoon is fairly certain, nobody knows how much of it will fall where, or when, over the course of the four months. Rajeevan, secretary in the ministry of earth sciences. Beyond 3-4 days we can’t predict exactly, says M. View Full Image Monsoon prediction is a tough proposition. “We don’t quite understand the dynamics of all of it," he said. But since the rains fall over such a big area, it is possible to distribute it in so many ways. This sheer luck of geography turns India into some sort of a “monsoon bucket", said Raghu Murtugudde, an atmospheric science professor at the University of Maryland. Every year, between late-May and early-June, ocean winds travelling at an altitude of 20 km barrel into the African Highlands in Zimbabwe, get diverted towards India, and eventually get trapped between the Himalayas and the Burmese mountains. The monsoon has kept its summer appointment with the subcontinent for at least the past 2 million years. In contrast, the IMD this year clearly indicated a stalling of the monsoon by mid-June, signalling important changes that are underway in how India understands and predicts its monsoon-changes which are primarily driven by a massive expansion in supercomputing capacity. But his attempt to take the weather establishment head-on is a stark reminder of what happens when the realities of rural India come face to face with an inexact science and a less-than-ideal forecasting apparatus. The police ultimately did not register Thaware’s complaint.
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