This comes a day after the meteorological department on Saturday issued an orange alert in Odisha amid heavy rain. Spells of intense rains pummeled Bhubaneswar, Puri, and other parts of Odisha which led to waterlogging in low-lying areas and traffic jams. The department warned of very heavy to extremely heavy rains during the next three days due to the formation of a low-pressure area over the northwest Bay of Bengal off the Odisha-West Bengal coasts.
Earlier in the day, Mrutyunjay Mohapatra India Meteorological Department (IMD) Director General informed that, climate change has hampered the ability of the forecasting agencies to accurately predict severe events and weather bureaus across the world are focusing on augmenting the observational network density and the weather prediction modelling to improve predictability.
Additionally, he said that though the monsoon rainfall has not shown any significant trend in the country, the number of heavy rainfall events has increased and that of light rainfall events has decreased due to climate change.
"We have got the digital data of the monsoon rainfall since 1901. Parts of north, east and northeast India show a decrease in rainfall, while some areas in the west, such as west Rajasthan, show an increase in precipitation.
"Thus, there is no significant trend if we consider the country as a whole -- the monsoon is random and it shows large-scale variations," the IMD chief said when asked about the impact of climate change on the Indian monsoon.
On July 27, the government had told Parliament that Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Meghalaya and Nagaland have shown significant decreasing trends in the southwest monsoon rainfall during the recent 30-year period (1989-2018, both years included). The annual rainfall over these five states, along with Arunachal Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh, has also shown significant decreasing trends, it said.
(With inputs from PTI)
