Chennai: A latest study by the National Institute of Oceanography at Goa published in a peer-reviewed journal has said warming of Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean is likely to weaken the India monsoon further in the near future, which could be accentuated by land mass changes across the country.
The study reviewed the under sediment cores derived from the Krishna Godavari basin of the Bay of Bengal to understand how the monsoon rainfall pattern has changed in the past 2,000 years.
Dr Divakar Naidu who led the two-year long study, said, “The intensity of the monsoon depends on the difference in temperatures on the Eurasian landmass and the waters of the Indian Ocean during the spring each year. If the landmass is warm and the sea waters are cool we will have a strong monsoon. But if the land is warm and the sea is also relatively warm, the monsoon will be weak.”
In the study, researchers have modelled the decade-wise variations in the monsoon rains over the subcontinent over the last two thousand years. The study, published in the journal Nature-Scientific Reports has found that decades that reported warm sea surface temperature corresponded with weaker monsoon rains due to bigger variation in land and sea temperature which prevents adequate cloud building.