Climate change may intensify floods in southern India
Source: Asia Insurance Review | Feb 2021
Climate change is likely to cause an uneven shifting of the tropical rain belt – a narrow band of heavy precipitation near the Equator – leading to increased flooding in parts of India according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The study examined computer simulations from 27 state-of-the-art climate models and measured the tropical rain belt’s response to a future scenario in which greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise through the end of the current century.
News agency Press Trust of India reports that according to the new research, a northward shift of the tropical rain belt over the eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean could result in “intensified flooding in southern India,” and may impact global biodiversity and food security by 2100.
The current study highlighted the drastic alterations to come over future decades in India by isolating the response in the eastern and western hemisphere zones.
University of California Irvine faculty and co-author of the study James Randorson said, “In Asia, projected reductions in aerosol emissions, glacier melting in the Himalayas and loss of snow cover in northern areas brought on by climate change will cause the atmosphere to heat up faster than in other regions.”
“We know that the rain belt shifts toward this heating, and that its northward movement in the eastern hemisphere is consistent with these expected impacts of climate change,” he said.
According to the research team the study combined the engineering approach of system’s thinking with data analytics and climate science to reveal subtle manifestations of global warming on regional rainfall extremes. A