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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | All three extreme events and the cause common

All three extreme events and the cause common

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published Published on Sep 4, 2017   modified Modified on Sep 4, 2017
-The Telegraph

New Delhi:
The bouts of rainfall that battered Houston, Mumbai and Calcutta last week, albeit in vastly different amounts, may earn tags of extreme rain events that weather scientists say are becoming more common under the influence of global warming.

The tropical storm Harvey set a record for continental US with 132cm rainfall about 45km southeast of Houston on August 29. Mumbai's Santa Cruz weather station documented 31cm rain over a 12-hour period the same day. And Calcutta's weather office recorded 9cm through the torrential downpour on Friday evening.

"Any rain 6.5cm or more is heavy rainfall," said Asish Sen, a senior weather scientist at the India Meteorological Department, Calcutta. Episodes of heavy or intense rain when concentrated over small pockets of space and spans of time are extreme events, he said.

Meteorologists at the Calcutta weather office said the 9cm rain on Friday was concentrated between 11.30am and 8.30pm, with most of the rain during the late evening hours. "On the outskirts, beyond about 30km, the rain didn't have the intensity it had in the city," Sen said.

Climate scientists in India and elsewhere have documented a rise in the frequency of such extreme weather events - not just intense rainfall, but heat waves, droughts and floods too.

Indian researchers Madhavan Rajeevan and Dushmanta Pattnaik were among the first to document what they said was a "significant increasing trend" of extreme rainfall events during the June-to-September monsoon season through an analysis of daily rainfall from 1951 to 2005.

Their study conducted eight years ago had also shown that concentrations of extreme rainfall events, marked by rainfall 12.5cm or higher, were likely to occur along the west coast, in central India and eastern India.

US-based researchers have cautioned that global warming - driven by emissions of greenhouse gases - is also likely to lead to an increase in the occurrence of "very intense cyclones", although the actual global numbers of cyclones are likely to decrease or change little.

The warming in the decades to come is likely to "cause tropical cyclones to have substantially higher rainfall rates than present-day ones", the US National Oceans and Atmospheric Administration's geophysical fluid dynamics laboratory has said in a document reviewing current research.

Six days ago, as sections of scientists and members of the public turned to social media to discuss Harvey, Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the Pennsylvania State University tweeted that Hurricane Sandy that struck northeastern US in October 2012 was a 500-year event. "It's now a 30-year event because of climate change. Will be a 3-5 year event if we don't act," he tweeted.

The evidence for a rise in the frequency of extreme weather events has been accumulating. But it was only in March this year that Mann collaborating with scientists in Germany proposed for the first time a likely mechanism that might explain seemingly diverse and distant extreme weather events.

Please click here to read more.

The Telegraph, 4 September, 2017, https://www.telegraphindia.com/1170904/jsp/nation/story_170730.jsp


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