The word monsoon blew into English from Portuguese nearly 400 years ago, via the Arabic word for season—“mawsim”
eyes and a face wizened by the sun, Narayanappa looks down to the ground and then, slowly, up to the skies. After weeks of harsh heat his land, one and a half hectares of peanuts, chillies and mulberry bushes, has turned to dust. At the beginning of June, a dozen families local to Kuppam, a village in the Chittoor district of the south-eastern state of Andhra Pradesh, came together, as they do every year, to sacrifice a goat as a divine downpayment on a good monsoon.
The metamorphosis brought by the burst of the monsoon is profound. Brown landscapes turn green, dusts become muds, cracks turn into mouths through which the earth slakes its thirst. The Ganges and the other great rivers fill then overflow, spreading silt-rich fertility across their floodplains. In the countryside the air takes up the petrichor aroma of fresh earth.
There are other monsoonal circulations around the world—in Mexico and the American south-west and in west Africa, as well as in East Asia, to the circulation of which the South Asian monsoon is conjoined. But geography makes the South Asian monsoon particular in a number of ways. The Indian Ocean, unlike the Pacific and the Atlantic, does not stretch up into the Arctic. This means that water warmed in the tropical regions cannot just flow north, taking its heat with it.
During the northern hemisphere’s winter, the ITCZ sits south of the equator in the Indian Ocean. As warmth creeps north, so does the ITCZ, becoming a dynamic part of the monsoon. It ends up nestled against the Himalayas, bringing the southern trades with it. But their move from the southern hemisphere to the northern, and the constraining effect of high pressure over Africa, sees them twisted from south-easterlies to south-westerlies.
Arabs, east Africans, Bengalis, Tamils, Parsis, Malays, Chinese, “Manila men” and Okinawans met and traded, sometimes sojourning in each other’s lands, sometimes returning on the next season’s winds. When European merchant venturers—Portuguese, Dutch, French and British—came to the region they joined in these seasonal rhythms.
Yet no illustrious ruler had turned his attention to the Godavari. Its improvement fell instead to an unassuming engineer from Dorking in Surrey, Arthur Cotton. Thousands of Indian labourers working under his direction built a giant barrage at Dowleswaram, regulating the river’s flow through the use of huge gates described at the time as “the noblest feat of engineering skill which has yet been accomplished in British India”.
A century later, Amartya Sen, a Nobel-winning economist, argued that what happened in the 1870s was the rule, not the exception: governments are the general cause of famine. Mass starvation is not brought about by a crop-disease- or climate-driven absolute lack of food but by policies and hierarchies which stop people from exchanging their primary “entitlement”, in Mr Sen’s terms—for instance, their labour—for what food there is.
This coupled system has, since Bjerknes, been known as ENSO: EN for El Niño, the name that Peruvians give to warm waters around Christmas time; SO for the Southern oscillation. There are other regular oscillations in the planet’s climate, but ENSO is by far the most important one.
The certainty of daily rain, though, marks Mawsynram out as unusual. In most places, there is a great deal of variation in rainfall over the course of the monsoon. The season is marked by prominent “active” spells, typically when depressions travel west along the monsoon front, followed by dry “breaks”. Timing the sowing of a successful crop is a gamble on what breaks may come, and for how long.
In 2015 a joint American-Indian mission used Mr Venkatesan’s hardware, among other tools, to study interactions between the bay and the weather in unprecedented detail. The study reinforced the scientists’ belief that the bay’s quick changes are the key to the breaks between monsoon rains. Rain falling onto the bay itself cools the surface layer enough to limit the convection that would produce more rain for a while before the surface heats back up again.
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