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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | India has begun to reverse 50-year-dry spell: MIT study

India has begun to reverse 50-year-dry spell: MIT study

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published Published on Jul 28, 2017   modified Modified on Jul 28, 2017
-PTI

‘North central region seeing much wetter pattern, with stronger monsoons over the last 15 years’

Washington: Monsoon has strengthened over north central India in the last 15 years, researchers from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have said, indicating a reversal in the general perception that the region has dried up in over a decade.

Chien Wang, a senior research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, the Center for Global Change Science, co-authored the study with Qinjian Jin, a postdoctoral researcher in the Joint Programme for the Science and Policy of Global Change, on Indian Monsoon was published yesterday in Nature Climate Change. “The Indian monsoon is considered a textbook, clearly defined phenomenon, and we think we know a lot about it, but we don’t. Here, we identify a phenomenon that was mostly overlooked,” said Chien Wang.

The study said heightened monsoon activity has reversed a 50-year drying period during which the monsoon season brought relatively little rain to northern and central India. Since 2002, the researchers have found, this drying trend has given way to a much wetter pattern, with stronger monsoons supplying much-needed rain, along with powerful, damaging floods, to the populous north central region of India.

A shift in India’s land and sea temperatures may partially explain this increase in monsoon rainfall. The researchers note that starting in 2002, nearly the entire Indian subcontinent has experienced very strong warming, reaching between 0.1 and 1 degree Celsius per year. Meanwhile, a rise in temperatures over the Indian Ocean has slowed significantly, it said.

Indian Ocean warming slows

“Climatologically, India went through a sudden, drastic warming, while the Indian Ocean, which used to be warm, all of a sudden slowed its warming,” Wang said. “This may have been from a combination of natural variability and anthropogenic influences, and we are still trying to get to the bottom of the physical processes that caused this reversal,” he said in a statement.

Scientists had previously observed that, since the 1950s, the Indian monsoons were bringing less rain to north central India - a drying period that didn’t seem to let up, compared to a similar monsoon system over Africa and East Asia, which appeared to reverse its drying trend in the 1980s.

“There’s this idea in people’s minds that India is going to dry up. The Indian monsoon season is undergoing a longer drying than all other systems, and this created a hypothesis that, since India is heavily polluted by manmade aerosols and is also heavily deforested, these may be factors that cause this drying. Modelling studies also projected that this drying would continue to this century,” Wang wrote.

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The Hindu Business Line, 27 July, 2017, http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/economy/agri-business/india-has-begun-to-reverse-50yeardry-spell-mit-study/article9790483.ece?homepage=true


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