Northeast to witness more heat and rainfall: Study

NEW DELHI/BENGALURU: A study about climate change projections for the North-East States on Wednesday indicated an 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 till 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), used for climate modeling 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 includes 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 out 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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