Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Of rainfall or the lack of it.

Most, if not all the landslides in the Darjeeling-Sikkim Himalayas are rain induced, so keeping a track of the amount of rainfall & rainfall intensities is very much a part of our role.
2010 was a year of deficient rainfall in our area and as such, as far as landslides are concerned - it was a good year.
Rather alarmingly though, we seem to be following this trend in 2011 as well  and thus far, rainfall has again been deficient in most places in this area. The deviations from normals for some of towns in this region is given below :-

Rainfall data upto 14Jun2011


Normal
 Actual
 %departure




CoochBehar
299.3
150.5
-050.0
Bagdogra
205.6
209.1
002.0
Darjeeling
196.6
64.2
-067.0
Kalimpong
147.7
40.8
-072.0
Jalpaiguri
242.4
152.8
-037.0
Gangtok
326.2
293.9
-010.0
Pedong
186.1
137.0
-026.0

(Source I Met D, Sikkim)

And for those interested, I have placed two charts which explain what the Met pundits mean when they talk about rainfall intensities :-

Praful Rao




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