Word: monsoons
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Before the tempest struck, Delwara Begum and her family went to bed untroubled by the roaring winds, even though the monsoon season was approaching. Delwara was too poor to own a radio and did not know that the government had announced a signal-9 storm -- the second most severe warning -- earlier in the day. As the 20-ft. tidal waves destroyed her house, Delwara clutched her six-year-old daughter, clung to a bamboo beam, and was washed up battered but alive seven miles away; her husband and five other children perished...
Some scientists are still predicting that smoke from the gulf could disrupt the monsoon in the Indian subcontinent and pelt rich croplands there with acid rain. Nonsense, say scientists in New Delhi. Acidic pollutants would probably be neutralized by dust in the Indian air, which tends to be alkaline. Besides, observers have yet to see traces of smoke, and certainly nothing that would disrupt the subcontinent's weather patterns. "The monsoon is too large and powerful a global phenomenon to be affected by one local event," says Vasant Gowariker, a monsoon expert at India's Department of Science and Technology...
Outside, the rain is beating a relentless riff that is familiar to anyone who has lived through a monsoon in Southeast Asia. Inside the Army-issue tent in a clearing at the jungle's edge, Nash A. Miller, a onetime helicopter door gunner and crew chief, is changing into a dry pair of camouflage fatigues. As his two watchdogs prowl silently, Miller, nicknamed "Nam" (his initials), recounts his tale with a small, innocent smile. It begins at a firebase in the badlands west of Kontum, near the Vietnam-Cambodia border, in the summer...
...worst possibility is that the immense pall could lower temperatures in the Indian subcontinent four to five degrees, disrupting the monsoon rains that are essential to crops for the nations of that area. "If this goes on until spring and summer, it will be a direct threat to their food supply, which is already marginal," says Anne Ehrlich, a Sierra Club expert...
Known as the Magic Kingdom, Oman (estimated pop. 2 million) is a land of exceptional beauty and diversity. A 1,000-mile coastline arcs southward from the limestone cliffs of Musandam to the powdery beaches of Salalah, a major trading town in the monsoon-brushed province of Dhofar. Southwest of the former slave-trading port of Sur lies a 5,000-sq.-mi. sea of sand whose dune ridges rise as high as 350 ft. above the Wahiba desert floor. To the north, the Jebel Akhdar (Green Mountain) anchors the Hajar range. Mud-brick houses cling to its steep slopes...