Odisha set to face hotter days, more cyclones

No good news for Odisha. With Andaman and Nicobar island area growing hotter year after year, the State has to brace up for more cyclone brunt post monsoon period. More worrying for the State also is its days are getting hotter and nights getting cooler – a precursor to typical desert climate. Significantly, annual mean rainfall is rising, but for rain-fed agro Odisha, the shocker is mean monsoon rainfall is decreasing every year by 0.23 mm.

Such a gloomy outlook about Odisha has come to fore in an analysis done by the Indian Meteorological Department by taking into account the mean maximum, minimum temperature and rainfall data of a 60-year period (1951 – 2010) and was then extrapolated further to infer the scary outlook for Odisha.

Though the monsoon – 2015 in Odisha is in a fledgling state, disconcerting fact about 2014 monsoon in the State is it rained most during some 20 – 25 days of July – August, forcing floods on State and at the same time, districts adjoining Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh recorded mild dry condition. This, when the State as a whole received around 8 per cent excess rainfall in monsoon -2014, finds the Met data. Moreover, post monsoon State witnessed a rise in mean maximum temperature to make the days hotter and humid.

And the evolving scary scenario for Odisha is with Andaman and Nicobar Islands growing hotter by 0.02 degree Celsius every year thereby leading to a rise in sea surface temperature there, which in turn is becoming a fertile ground for cyclones to head towards State, it indicated. “Days getting hotter, nights getting cooler over the years and rainfall in monsoon declining by 0.23mm/year as per IMD 2013 analysis show that climate change factors are at work in Odisha,” observed IMD Bhubaneswar Director Sarat Sahu.