The study says that the Indian Ocean, the northern part of the Arabian sea, and the central Bay of Bengal is likely to see an increase in rough wave days that could impact the country’s coastal areas
RH Staff
December 9
A new study has revealed that India could experience an increase in rough wave days in the immediate future.
The study aimed to analyze extreme wave events shows that the Indian Ocean, the northern part of the Arabian sea, and the central Bay of Bengal is likely to see an increase in rough wave days that could impact the country’s coastal areas.
A team of scientists from the Department of Applied Sciences, National Institute of Technology Delhi; Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur; and Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services, Hyderabad, projected the likely future changes in extreme wave height indices over the Indian Ocean.
“The research published in the journal ‘Climate Dynamics’, Springer recently used COWCLIP2.0 datasets’ to show that large-scale distribution in future wave climate can vary significantly from the present,” said an official release issued by the Press Information Bureau of India.
The release said that the future projections indicate that under the climate scenario RCP4.5 (medium representative concentration pathway of greenhouse gases), the regions over the eastern tropical Indian Ocean, the northern sector of the Arabian Sea, and the central Bay of Bengal showed a strong positive increase in rough wave days.
“However, under a high-emission scenario corresponding to RCP8.5, a decreasing trend in rough wave days is likely over most of the regions in the Indian Ocean, with exception for regions in the north Arabian Sea and extra-tropical regions beyond 48° S in the Southern Indian Ocean sector,” it said. “Changes in high wave days are projected to intensify over the South Indian Ocean under both RCP 4.5 and 8.5 scenarios, and the wave-spell-storm duration is found to strengthen over the northern Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal, southeast Indian Ocean and South Indian Ocean under RCP8.5 forcing scenario”.
The study indicates that projected changes in the amplitude of high-frequency extreme wave events in the Southern hemisphere are driven by changes in a sea-level pressure gradient that is consistent with the projections of SAM (Southern Annular Mode) for the twenty-first century period.
