GUWAHATI: The month of July in Guwahati has started witnessing a steady outburst of mercury amounting to a steep rise in the temperature today.
According to Google's weather forecast, the 'temperature in Guwahati stands at 35 degrees celsius but feels like it is somewhere around 45 degrees celsius.
Speaking to the Sentinel, a city commuter, Amit Chaurasia said, "It's definitely astonishing that we are experiencing such scorching heat in mid-July when Shravan is about to begin. In June we witnessed heavy showers and now in July, we are facing scorching heat. In cities like Guwahati, we feel more than the actual degree just because of the humidity.
It wouldn't be wrong to say that such temperature has affected the movement on roads and those who can't afford to remain inside, are facing more difficulties while commuting."
In a recent study about climate change projections for the North-East States indicated overall warming of both summer and winter minimum temperatures, an increase in the number of rainy days and an increase in the number of heavy rainfall events across almost all the districts of the region.
These are the findings of 'District-Level Changes in Climate: Historical Climate and Climate Change Projections for the North-Eastern States of India' by the Centre for Study of Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP), a Bengaluru-based think tank.
The study projects changes in temperature and rainfall patterns in Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Tripura over the next three decades (from 2021 to 2050) and compares it to the historical period (from 1990 to 2019).
It analysed two representative scenarios: first at moderate emissions, what in technical terms is called as RCP 4.5, and second, for high emissions (RCP 8.5). There are four RCPs, the Representative Concentration Pathways, each of which is a greenhouse gas concentration trajectory adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and used for climate modelling in IPCC reports.
Stating that historically (1990-2019), temperature and rainfall have increased, and rainfall variability is high across all the Northeastern States, the important findings from the study include that there is an overall warming of both summer and winter minimum temperatures, an increase in the number of rainy days (more than 2.5 mm rainfall per day), and an increase in the number of heavy rainfall events across almost all the districts of the Northeastern States.
It also found that the summer maximum and the winter minimum temperatures are projected to increase by 1 degree Celsius to 1.5 degrees Celsius under the RCP 4.5 scenario and 1 degree Celsius to 2 degrees Celsius under the RCP 8.5 scenario.
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