Days of evenly spread rainfall are past, warn scientists

The Economic Times , Tuesday, August 05, 2014
Correspondent : Urmi A Goswami
NEW DELHI: India should brace for more calamities like landslide that devastated a village near Pune, blocking of Kosi river in Nepal and catastrophic rain and flood in Uttarakhand last year. Climate scientists say days of evenly spread rainfall are past and globally, there is a growing instance of torrential downpours separated by dry patches.

The weather office says at least in central India, there is empirical evidence to show that extreme rainfall events are rising.

"Heavy rain events (more than 0cm/day) over central India are increasing at about 1 per cent/year while weak and moderate events are decreasing at about the same rate over the past 50 years," minister for science and technology and earth sciences Jitendra Singh told Parliament last week.

RK Pachauri, chairman of intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC), has consistently raised concerns about the rising incidence of extreme rainfall, although there many not be a direct link between any single event and climate change.

"No single extreme event can be attributed to human induced climate change, because it could have occurred as a result of various causes. However, the IPCC has assessed that extreme precipitation events are on the increase over many parts of the globe. In future, extreme precipitation events over most of the mid-latitude land masses and over wet tropical regions will very likely (probability of over 90 per cent) become more intense and more frequent by the end of this century."

 
SOURCE : http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/agriculture/days-of-evenly-spread-rainfall-are-past-warn-scientists/articleshow/39652730.cms?prtpage=1
 


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