According to CNN's april 28, 2022 report, India is experiencing extremely rare heat weather in history, and according to the Indian Meteorological Authority (IMD), the future may be hotter!
India suffered its highest temperature in 122 years
India's high temperature season came a month earlier than normal this year, and the highest temperature in India in March has reached 38 °C, while the average temperature is 33.10 °C, setting a record for the same period in India's 122 years and slightly higher than the 2010 high temperature record (33.09 °C).
On the 26th of this month, the Indian city of Balmer has recorded a high temperature of 45.1 °C. Maximiliano Herrera, an expert on extreme weather issues, said a weather station in Pakistan broke the record for the highest temperature in the Northern Hemisphere for the same period at 47 degrees Celsius on the same day.
According to the India Centre for Science and environment (CSE), the heat wave has affected 15 States and Federal Territories of India since March 11, "Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh are the most affected states, with 25 days of heat wave and severe heat wave weather each during this period. "As shown in the following figure:
Compared with the daytime, it is more fatal than the high temperature at night
According to the Data of the Indian Meteorological Agency (IMD), in the next few days, the temperature in the north-central region of India, including New Delhi, will generally exceed 40 ° C, and may even be as high as 43 ~ 49 ° C, even at night the temperature will not be lower than 30 ° C, this temperature is difficult for people to sleep, which is a terrible day for India, which lacks cooling equipment.
What about air conditioning in India?
No matter how hot the weather is, as long as there is air conditioning, even if it is still possible, but unfortunately, the proportion of air conditioning in India is unimaginable.
According to a data on the proportion of air conditioning installation in various countries, China's air conditioning installation rate is about 60%, while India is about 5%, even if most of the Russian air conditioning installation rate in the Arctic Circle is higher than India, obviously this is related to the people's living standards, many people in India are even difficult to solve the problem of food and clothing, how to fund the installation of air conditioning?
In fact, Indians have air conditioning, they use water air conditioning!
A bit like the continental water-cooled air cooler, the principle is very simple, fill a water tank with breathable suction plants inside the wheat straw, and then install a fan, when the air flow through the wheat straw gap will evaporate the water, reduce the local temperature, through this area after the airflow temperature will have some drop.
But there is a problem with this air conditioner, first of all, these wheat straw and other organic matter will rot, the other is that the interior is easy to breed mosquitoes, and there is a limited cooling effect, it is really difficult to cool the overall indoor temperature, of course, more troublesome is that many high-temperature areas are still short of water.
How exactly did the heat in India happen?
April and May are the month before the southwest monsoon, before the abundant rain falls on the Indian land to bring the rainy season, the temperature during this time is the most difficult in India, but in the past India was not so high, why is this year's Indian climate abnormal?
One reason for this is the lack of rainfall, which Dr Sivananda Pai of the Kerala Institute for Climate Change Said said was "almost no rainfall in the western part of Rajasthan since March, with less than 87 percent of rainfall in northwest India and less than 70 percent of rainfall in central India."
Another reason is the effects of large-scale circulation, according to Raghu Murtugudde, climate scientist at the University of Maryland, the extreme heat in India in March-April 2022 is related to the la Niña phenomenon dominated by the Pacific Ocean, which lasts longer than expected, while another factor is the interaction of heat waves from the Arctic.
La Niña is a phenomenon in which the sea surface temperature in the western equatorial Pacific Ocean is significantly higher than in the eastern Pacific, and is caused by an excessively strong Walker circulation that carries heat towards the western Pacific Ocean, causing the western side of the Pacific Ocean to be significantly higher than the eastern side, which affects the northeast trade winds in the lower latitudes.
The figure above shows the change in the effect of subtropical high pressure in the western Pacific Ocean on summer wind rainfall in Asia in the late 1990s, where the sum of abnormal and average winds (represented by double-empty arrows) leads to an increase (decrease) in total wind speed, thereby cooling (heating) WNP (North IO). However, cooling in the WNP inhibits convection, which in turn produces falling atmospheric Rossby waves, which strengthen the western Pacific sub-high.
The other is the warm ridge from the Atlantic Ocean protruding into the north, with the movement of the westerly wind belt into the middle and low latitudes, blocked by the towering Tibetan Plateau, from the south side through Pakistan to the sky over India, together with the Indian Ocean heat wave to form this rare weather, but Raghu Murtugudde also admits that the current impact of La Niña on India's spring and summer is indeed somewhat unexpected.
Changes in the Northern Hemisphere over the next 10 days
Is it related to the Indian Ocean dipole phenomenon?
The Indian Ocean dipole phenomenon and the Indian weather do have some relationship, it is very similar to the La Niña phenomenon, but also the Indian Ocean east and west sides of the relatively high temperature difference, the west high when the precipitation in eastern Africa will increase, and vice versa is the increase in the eastern side of precipitation, but in terms of time, the Indian Ocean dipole occurs between May and September, and it is not yet the time point when the dipole phenomenon occurs.
What is the outlook for the future weather in India?
The answer is very unoptimistic, according to IMD (India Meteorological Agency) forecast, India's high temperature weather will continue until the rainy season, simply put, this high temperature will continue until the end of May, there is still a month to survive, but the good news is that IMD expects this year's rainy season precipitation to be the same as in normal years, although this seems to be good news, but how to survive this month's hot days is indeed a big problem.
How scary will the climate be this year?
As early as August 2021, a report released by the IPCC (The United Nations Intergovernmental Climate Organization) pointed out with "high confidence" that extreme heat phenomena in South Asia are increasing rapidly, and the rise in extreme temperatures is attributable to global warming, concluding that:
"More intense heat waves of longer durations and occurring at a higher frequency are projected over India,"
"Longer, more frequent and intense heat waves are expected over India."
It should be said that the current state is very familiar to everyone, because in 2021 the world has also encountered quite extreme weather, the following is a brief review of the extreme weather events in 2021:
- 1. High temperature in Moscow at the end of May;
- 2. Super high temperature in the United States and Canada at the end of June;
- Heavy rains in Europe in Mid-March and July
- April, late July, Henan, China, heavy rain,
- High temperature in southern Europe in May and August;
- 6. Heavy rains in Shanxi, China from the end of September to the beginning of October,
- Heavy rains in Southeast Asia and India at the end of July and October;
- 8. Blizzards in northeast China in August and November;
- ......
It should be said that the above is only an incomplete record of extreme weather in 2022, such as the drought in Taiwan Province and Madagascar in Africa, the extreme drought and fire in the western United States, and the super fire in Siberia.
The occurrence of these extreme events must make you aware of a phenomenon, extreme climate from the previous two or three times a year, to 2021 frequent occurrences, may be many friends have been paralyzed, but there is a very extreme phenomenon is that the areas that have never had extreme events before have also occurred, such as the floods in Henan and Shanxi on the mainland, which was unimaginable in the past.
2021 European floods
This poses great risk to ordinary people, because disasters occur in areas that would not have happened before, and people are very prone to let their guard down, and heat waves will begin before the summer of 2022, a full month earlier than the first northern hemisphere heat wave appeared at the end of May last year.
So what's going to happen in 2022? This is difficult to predict, but the National Climate Center of the mainland already has a forecast:
It is estimated that the overall climate conditions on the mainland during the flood season (May to September) this year will be general to biased, with equal emphasis on drought and flood, obvious regional and phased drought and flood disasters, more extreme weather and climate events, and the main rainy areas in the north of the mainland; the number of typhoons landing on the mainland throughout the year is close to that of the perennial to the high.
It is worth mentioning that this year is the third year of the La Niña phenomenon, and according to the predictions of NOAA and the Japan Meteorological Agency, the La Niña phenomenon will most likely continue this summer, which will lead to a high water temperature in the Western Pacific, which will provide a steady stream of energy for the generation of typhoons, and the La Niña phenomenon will lead to the north of the subtropical high-pressure belt, making the probability of typhoons landing on the mainland increase significantly, so this summer and autumn, it is estimated that the days will be too good.
Read more: India will be the country most affected by climate change
According to CSEINDIA (India Science and Environment Center), this year's heat wave occurred just in the wheat growth stage and had a very large impact on agriculture, with reports from Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh about 20 to 60 percent of agricultural losses.
In the Himalayan regions of Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Uttarakhand, where heat waves are unlikely to occur, glaciers will melt faster, resulting in melting ice floods, which will also cause a decline in the amount of melted ice during the summer irrigation season, and the impact on these states will continue into the summer.
According to data from Scottish meteorologist Duncan, 1 billion people in Pakistan and India affected by heat may be affected, accounting for more than 10% of the global population, and India is also the world's main food-producing region, and in 2022, it has also suffered from the impact of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, and food prices have soared, so many underdeveloped areas will have humanitarian disasters in 2022.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN climate change body, India is one of the countries most affected by the climate crisis.
reference:
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/27/weather/extreme-heat-wave-india-pakistan-monsoon-climate-change/index.html
https://www.cseindia.org/heat-waves-in-india-a-cse-media-briefing-note-11241