Heat waves, excessively hot weather accompanied by high humidity during the summer season of April and May are increasing and causing an unprecedented number of deaths across the country in recent years.
Key Points
- Researchers now claim that it could be due to the Arctic region warming up like never before and at an alarming rate with temperatures increasing more than twice as fast as the global average.
- Increased surface temperatures or Arctic warming is a result of global warming.
- A recent study including researchers from India and Brazil published a research article entitled Large-scale connection to Deadly Indian Heatwaves.
- In this article, the researchers have stated that Indian heatwaves occur due to a theoretical mechanism called Quasi-Resonant Amplification (QRA).
- The researchers, including National Institute for Space researcher V. B. Rao, SRM Institute of Science and Technology’s T. V. Lakshmi Kumar, Andhra University’s B. Mahendranath, Azim Premji University’s K. Koteswara Rao, and University of Hyderabad’s Govardhan Dandu, have shown for the first time that heatwaves leading to deaths, can occur in India, due to QRA, caused by the Arctic warming a result of global warming.
Mitigating the change
Hence, there is an urgent need to plan mitigation of this very adverse climate change. This QRA mechanism is also shown to be the cause of the 2003 European heatwave, 2010 Pakistan flood, and Russian heatwave, and other extreme events affecting human and animal life.
Dr. Rao and co-authors said that Indian heatwaves can be predicted about four days in advance prior to their occurrence. The results of this study were published in the reputed British journal, Quarterly Journal of Royal Meteorology.
