Northern winter storms in India now more frequent in summer, raise risk of heavy flooding: Study

Meanwhile, as the region warms, winter snowfall is reducing, threatening spring water supplies, they said.”Strong storms are now twice as likely to occur in the north of India in June compared to 70 years ago. With warmer and moister air at this time of year, these late storms are dumping heavy rainfall instead of snow,” said Hunt, who is a researcher at the University of Reading in UK.”This raises the risk of deadly flooding like we saw in Uttarakhand in 2013 and around Delhi in 2023,” he said.The study’s authors attributed this seasonal shift to global warming and changes in the subtropical jet stream, a high-altitude air current that steers western disturbances.Global warming is weakening the temperature difference between the equator and the poles that normally draw the jet stream northward in summer, they explained.Further, the rapid warming of the Himalayan Plateau, lying at the intersection of Central, South and East Asia, is fuelling a stronger jet stream that powers more frequent and intense storms, the team explained.They said that as a result, the jet stream is increasingly lingering at southern latitudes later into spring and summer, allowing more storms to strike North India after the winter snow season.



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