Let me try to answer briefly, though meteorology or climate change science is my area of expertise. I normally don't venture into unknown territories
My surmises are based on my extensive research on past extreme rainfall events & PMP estimates (upper bound of rainfall)
My surmises are based on my extensive research on past extreme rainfall events & PMP estimates (upper bound of rainfall)
It's not about the overall rainfall in an year, though the trend is more or less not much difference, we can observe a slight decrease. Same time we are seeing a skewed no of rainfall days off late. That means less number of rainy days and more intense rains
Climate change scientists predicted more frequent rainfall events for Western Coast. But I think that the present rainfall events of Mumbai of 2005 or Kerala of 2018 are not enough to make a reach a conclusion that we are experiencing the after effects of climate change.
Take for example Kerala, we had a two major floods in 1924 & 1961 set apart by 37 years. Also we had a history of such extreme events happen in a span of aroumd 50+/-10 years too. So 2018 was lurking there, if we look at the long term pattern.
I have to search on my collection of research material somewhere on Travancore records, they speak about a pattern..If I will be able to trace it, I will put it here for you. But for the time being, I trust my vague memory
My humble conclusion is that if we need to attribute this to climate change, we need more evidence, ie, more frequent such events. Rather than deviating from the long pattern of floods we had seen in last several centuries
I kept my mind open and wait for more evidence rather than jumping into conjectures based on mere surmises. Hard data is essential for making any scientific conclusions, or to rule out that this is not following a pattern, the scale is more aligned to it for the time being!
My bad!!! I mean, "is not" not "is"
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This event looks like more or less like a 1 in 1000 year flood event. Don't think that such events will happen only once in 1000 years!
Better way to say is that a 1 in 1000 year flood event may happen with a probability of 9.56% in a span of 100 years
Better way to say is that a 1 in 1000 year flood event may happen with a probability of 9.56% in a span of 100 years
As Kerala had done after 1961 flood event, we should take stock of these floods in a critical manner. We should invite deliberations for technical, sustainable and environmental angles rather than subscribing to extreme view points. We need talent pool of domain experts
We should ask ourselves why we don't have informed detailed deliberations with domain experts? Why we are so content with being generalists and medicore? Why our literacy fails to create talent pools? Why we listen more to charlatans who are good at word play rather than content?
Kerala's biggest drawback is our poor institutional memory and a complete vaccum of documentation. We believe that we all jack of all trades and the sense of entitlement is at times dragging us to break that barrier.
