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  Straits Times 27 Aug 07
Asia's wet, wild weather here to stay
Scientists say a combination of seasonal floods, more frequent rains and an upward trend of extreme weather are to blame
By Cheong Suk-Wai

A TRIPLE whammy of seasonal floods, increasingly intense and more frequent rains and a steady upward trend of wetter weather has been behind some of the worst floods in Asian history in recent weeks.

Torrid torrential rains inundating at least nine Asian countries since June have turned much of the continent into a landscape resembling little Lego blocks adrift in an ocean.

Dr David Jones, the director of climate analysis at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, told The Straits Times: 'This period is primarily Asia's flood season and, indeed, it would be unusual if there wasn't such flooding in summertime.

'But what's wacky about this weather is its frequency and intensity, suggesting many unfortunate changes in climate happening all at once.'

He said the most likely reasons for the devastating deluges were:

# Massive loads of monsoon rain in the atmosphere;
# More frequent colliding of moisture-soaked sea breezes, flinging them skywards to be cooled into rainclouds;
# More frequent flows of hot air from sea to land, which are then cooled in the mountains into rainclouds;
# The melting of ice on the Tibetan Plateau, the source of Asia's biggest rivers, namely the Ganges, the Mekong and the Yangtze; and
# More frequent extreme weather triggered by an increasingly warmer planet, which was being heated by, among other things, blasts of greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as carbon dioxide from traffic congestion, and methane from padi fields, cows and especially humans, Asia being the world's most populous continent.

GHGs trap heat, thus warming the air around us. Warm air, in turn, traps moisture. As hot, moisturesoaked air rises, it cools into fat clouds which then burst and fall down as rain.

Dr Koichi Kurihara, director of climate prediction at the Tokyo Climate Centre (TCC), one of Asia's top monitoring hubs, and his colleague Kumi Hayashi told The Straits Times that, to make matters worse, the climate cycle creating such unseasonal rain has quickened in Asia to at least one cycle every 30 to 60 days.

While research showed that India, Bangladesh and the Philippines had had record-breaking floods in the past three years (2004, 2005, 2006), the factors cited by Drs Jones and Kurihara have left Asia chalking up death-and-destruction statistics that are as staggering as they are unprecedented, said climatologists and relief workers worldwide.

More than half of Bangladesh has been deluged, with at least 700 people killed, more than 10 million others marooned and 485,600ha of crops destroyed.

Neighbouring India has an official flood death toll of 2,106 people from rainstorm lashings since mid-June, with more than 35 million livelihoods ruined.

China, with at least 13.5 million people already battered by showers especially in Chongqing, Anhui and Jiangsu provinces, was reeling from Typhoon Sepat earlier this month which left at least 40 dead, more than 1.7 million others evacuated from their homes and 313,600ha of crops destroyed.

Also mired earlier this month was North Korea, with 600 dead or missing and 400,000 others marooned. Similar disasters on relatively smaller scales have been plaguing parts of Pakistan, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia in the same period.

The bottomline, said Dr Kurihara, was that this Noah's Ark scenario is expected to continue well into next month, if not the rest of the year.

What makes matters worse, said Ms Shailendra Ashwant, is the fact that no scientist can easily pinpoint the specific triggers for such wild weather.

'There is still so much scientists don't know about the way global weather systems operate and respond to climate,' said Ms Ashwant, the South-east Asian climate and energy campaign manager of environmental group Greenpeace.

Agreeing, Dr Jones said: 'Our atmosphere is very chaotic and complex, so there is no such thing as direct cause and direct effect. No flap of butterfly wings can cause a tornado.'

Indeed, Dr Rupa Kumar Kolli, the director of climate application at the World Meteorological Organisation in Geneva, Switzerland, told The Straits Times that it would take him and his fellow scientists months to painstakingly collect and analyse the possible causes - and they have barely begun.

But there is one thing, at least, on which all the weather experts we spoke to agreed: Extreme and increasingly frequent rainfall in Asia is here to stay.

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