Climate Change Is Breaking The Monsoon

Extreme temperatures = extreme rains = extremely bad

indi.ca
The Startup
Published in
6 min readSep 25, 2019

--

From the amazing NASA Goddard video⁰ on monsoons

It’s raining right now. It’s been raining for days. In the long run, it’s been raining on my little civilization for thousands of years.

This is our monsoon.

In a lot of ways, the monsoon is a natural disaster. It’s a flood. The only reason we’re not building an ark is because it’s predictable, and we’ve built our agriculture and economy around it for generations.

That’s all changing because the climate is changing. The rain is increasingly flooding homes. Droughts are increasingly wrecking crops. The engine that has powered our civilization for literally thousands of years is overheating.

Here’s how.

How The Monsoon Works

Temperature difference across the two monsoons — NASA

The monsoon runs on one simple thing. Temperature. Temperature creates high and low pressure fronts which move clouds around. It’s obviously a complicated interaction, but the key input is temperature.

If you stop to think about it, it’s amazing. The whole thing is a solar powered, wind-driven irrigation system that serves all of Asia. It’s the most efficient and elegant agricultural system in the world, and we’re messing it up. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let’s look at the monsoon in action, two monsoons actually.

Summer Monsoon

Hot land sucks in air from the ocean — NASA

In the summer, the Indian subcontinent heats up a lot. The ocean, however, only heats up a little. It’s like how a swimming pool stays cool on a hot day.

This heat expands the air above the land, creating an area of low pressure.

In contrast, the air above the ocean is cool, moist and dense. It’s under higher pressure, like the air inside a blown-up balloon. If you let the balloon go, the air rushes out. And that’s what happens.

--

--

indi.ca
The Startup

Indrajit (Indi) Samarajiva is a Sri Lankan writer. Follow me at www.indi.ca, or just email me at indi@indi.ca.