In most of the northern hemisphere, summer comes in June, July, and August. Not so in India. Here, summer begins in April and ends with the start of the monsoon wind shift– late May or June.
Deadly summer heat waves are not unusual in India; hundreds died in the events of 2002, 2003, and 2010. But this May has been especially brutal, with temperatures soaring to near 120 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of southeast India.
Following a cool (relatively) April, the extreme heat caught meteorologists, and most Indians, by surprise.
With much of India lacking air conditioning, and with power outages preventing those who have it from using it, residents were overwhelmed by the heat, and many (up to 1,800 by some reports) succumbed to it.
According to the International Disaster Database, this is the second deadliest heat wave in India, and the eighth deadliest in the world, going back to 1900.
Loo Delivers The Hot Air
A local phenomenon of the Indian subcontinent known as Loo, a hot wind from the northwest, is responsible for the high temperatures. Loo brings air from Pakistan and Afghanistan across India to the southeast coast. The dry, cloudless flow heats under the high spring sun as it moves southeast. Temperatures normally reach 100 degrees and higher over much of India in May.
This is the the average rainfall in India by month. There is a huge increase from May to June as the rainy phase of the monsoon begins. Graphic courtesy of NOAA.
Loo is actually one phase of the Indian monsoon, and the country will enter a different phase — the one people are most familiar with — in the next few weeks, as somewhat cooler, humid, and rainy conditions overspread the country.
We normally associate the word monsoon with this rainy phase, but the complete monsoon is a yearlong sloshing of air back and forth from land to sea.
Credit to decodedscience.com
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