NEW DELHI: As May goes in Delhi, the weather this year has been unusually fickle. Instead of the searing loo, the city has had thundershowers bringing temperatures down every few days.
Not that Delhiites are complaining, but questions have been asked about the loo — so synonymous with the Delhi summer — playing hooky intermittently for the past several years. The city also had an uncharacteristically long, and mild, winter running up to the end of March this year. Is the city climate changing?
The Indian Meteorological Department says these deviations are normal, but there's at least one climate expert who sees a larger trend. "These are manifestations of climate change due to global warming," says Murari Lal, a former IIT professor who is now a senior climate change specialist with a transnational infrastructure consultancy firm.
"Delhi weather has been showing high variability in the last few years. Certain fixed weather markers, like the inevitable rain in February and loo winds in May, have been disturbed. For instance, instead of February, it rained in April this year. I see these as local signals of a global change in weather," says Lal, who has served as the lead author from India in most reports of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Lal's prognosis is severe. He says unpredictability in Delhi's weather will increase in the next 8-10 years before stabilising into a new pattern. "It's difficult to predict what specific weather changes will occur, but, undeniably, intra-seasonal variability across India will increase," he says.
