Word: monsoonal
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...Surat roughly one half of the 12.5 million population lives in shantytowns outside city sanitation control. In addition, a ten foot monsoon flood in August strew sewage everywhere...
...across a belt of countries, ranging from Saudi Arabia to India. Apart from posing a health threat to the people closest to ground zero, the pollution is likely to harm wildlife, agriculture and fisheries. At worst, fallout from the oil fires may disrupt the region's annual monsoon rains...
...effect of the pollution on weather patterns could be even more calamitous. Last week Farouk El-Baz, director of Boston University's Center for Remote Sensing, proposed a new theory of how the oil fires could hurt millions of people by affecting life-giving monsoons in July and August. El- Baz, who just completed a research trip to the gulf region, derives his ideas in part from an earlier analysis he did of the impact of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Soil stirred up by that conflict doubled the intensity and frequency of the shamal sandstorms...
Such a disturbance of the monsoon would cause a major disaster. For instance, rains over the Ethiopian highlands supply 80% of the water that feeds the Nile. If those rains fell offshore, the tens of millions of people in that already drought-stricken region would suffer even more grievously. Parts of Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and India could be similarly affected...
...dynamics of the monsoon are so variable and complicated that even if the rains fail this summer, it will be difficult to prove that the oil fires caused the trouble. On the basis of fluctuations in Pacific Ocean temperatures, Jagadish Shukla, director of the University of Maryland's Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Interactions, is predicting that this year's rains will be less than normal. Shukla and others wonder whether the heat from the fires is sufficient to affect a system as large as the monsoon. El-Baz readily admits that his theory is riddled with unknowns...