Word: monsoon
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Munter has been in Harvard Square with his large "Save the Boat People" sign for seven out of the last 14 days. "I'll be doing it until they're picked up out of the ocean or the monsoon hits," he said yesterday...
...from the fighting, tens of thousands of hungry, homeless Cambodian peasants have fled to makeshift refugee camps in Thailand; columns of Khmer Rouge guerrillas have also crossed the border temporarily, to rest and regroup. The exodus has been building since mid-April, when six Vietnamese divisions launched a pre-monsoon offensive to eliminate Khmer Rouge pockets of resistance along the Thai border. leng Sary, Deputy Premier in the Pol Pot regime, has accused the Vietnamese of practicing genocide and a scorched-earth policy in carrying out the relentless drive...
Launched a few weeks ago to coincide with the start of the winter season, the $50 million multination effort, called MONEX (for Monsoon Experiment), is being directed by the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization. At the command post in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, some 70 Americans and Soviets, as well as weather watchers from Asian and other countries, are beginning the first systematic profile of an annual monsoon cycle. Gathering data from an area of some 28 million sq. mi., the scientists have two lofty goals: to explore the origin of monsoon winds so they...
Having long concentrated on northerly climes, scientists know little more about the monsoon than did the old Arab traders who named the awesome wind mausam, or season. In fact there are not one but two monsoons every year. Rolling off the tropical seas from the southwest, the sodden summer winds unleash torrential rains that give life to crops across India-and take human lives as swollen rivers flood towns (this year's toll: at least 900 dead, 3 million homeless). Reversing themselves after an autumn lull, the winds return, this time from the northeast, carrying cool, relatively...
...familiar as the monsoon cycle may be, the winds remain inscrutable-"a sea of question marks," says Australian Meteorologist Peter Webster. Predicting them is bafflingly difficult; they are a cauldron of complex, wildly fluctuating conditions. Says the U.S. National Science Foundation's Richard Greenfield: "They can vary fantastically over the space of a few miles, and even a one-or two-degree temperature shift sets vast amounts of airborne water dropping...