According to a top climate scientist, the Arabian Sea's warming is facilitating the production of dense cloud formations, which would cause kerala to experience exceptionally heavy rains in a shorter amount of time and raise the risk of landslides. At least 45 persons were killed in a series of landslides that occurred early on tuesday in Kerala's wayanad district due to extremely heavy rain. Many were thought to be buried beneath the rubble.
 
The active monsoon offshore trough that has been affecting the entire Konkan region for the last two weeks has caused abundant rainfall in the districts of Kasargod, Kannur, wayanad, Calicut, and Malappuram, according to S Abhilash, director of the Advanced Centre for Atmospheric Radar Research at Cochin university of Science and technology (CUSAT).
 
Two weeks of rain had left the earth soggy. He told news agency PTI that on Monday, a deep mesoscale cloud system developed off the coast of the arabian sea, causing exceptionally heavy rain in wayanad, Calicut, Malappuram, and Kannur, as well as isolated landslides.
 
"The clouds were very deep, similar to those seen during the 2019 kerala floods," Abhilash stated.
 
According to him, there has been a noticeable pattern of extremely deep cloud systems forming over the southeast Arabian Sea. These systems occasionally encroach on land, as was the case in 2019.
 
"Our research found that the southeast arabian sea is becoming warmer, causing the atmosphere above this region, including kerala, to become thermodynamically unstable," Abhilash stated.
 
"Climate change is connected to this atmospheric instability that facilitates the production of dense clouds. This type of rainfall was once more typical in the Konkan region to the north of Mangalore." The primary cause of this very intense rainfall, according to him, is the rain-bearing band with dense clouds moving southward due to climate change.

The npj Climate and Atmospheric Science journal reported in 2022 that research by Abhilash and colleagues revealed that rainfall across India's west coast is becoming more convective.
 
In a further study, which was published in Elsevier in 2021, Abhilash and researchers from IITM and IMD discovered that one of the Konkan region's hotspots for high rainfall (between 14 and 16 degrees north) appeared to have moved south, perhaps with lethal results.
 
 
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Landslides

S Venkateshwari

01/08/2024 11:19 AM