![]() That is why REMO picks out smaller areas and analyzes climate in finer grids with squares measuring 10 x 10 or 25 x 25 kilometers. Unfortunately, there is as yet no computer powerful enough to calculate worldwide climate for decades for each square kilometer of the Earth’s surface. The narrow boot of Italy, for example, falls right through the global climate grid: Italy = sea. The average data for a 200-kilometer square gives no real indication of the peculiarities of a region. A lot happens in 200 kilometers – the landscape changes, the weather changes. By human standards, 200 kilometers is a long distance. They analyze airflows, air pressures, temperatures and winds. Only for a very small number of studies do they go down to 100 x 100 kilometers. They divide up the entire globe into a grid of weather squares measuring approximately 200 x 200 kilometers each. The global climate models (GCMs) the IPCC uses are rather coarse in comparison. It zooms into the regions, into valleys, mountain forests and big cities. REMO is a kind of magnifying glass that assesses the climate outlook on a small scale. To do this, he uses the REMO regional model, an elaborate software program that took meteorologist Daniela Jacob and her team at the Hamburg-based institute years to develop. Working at the Climate Service Center and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, he is investigating the future outlook for water resource availability in India. Pankaj Kumar is one of the scientists studying the finer details. The global climate model grid is too coarse to gauge what will happen at the local level. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that the writing is on the wall and the average global temperature could rise by more than 2 degrees Celsius, it really means nothing at all – because the real effects of climate change are seen on the ground: in the countryside, on the coasts, in cities. What if the rain comes late or early? What if it changes its duration? What if it doesn’t come at all? At the same time, there is increasing anxiety that climate change could throw the interplay of dry season and monsoon downfalls out of kilter in just a few decades. As it grows, so, too, does the amount of food the subcontinent must produce if it is to feed all of its people. ![]() India’s population is 1.2 billion and growing. The monsoon brings almost enough rain for an entire year – drinking water and water for fields and plantations. Yet for the Indians, this is no catastrophe: it has been dry for months. People wade along, knee-deep in water, while cars create small bow waves in the flooded streets. The water engulfs paths, fields and villages. The rain falls on parched ground, fills creeks and rivers. The leaden mass of clouds navigates around the mountain slopes and finally spreads over all of India as far as the Himalayas. It rains for weeks: the monsoon has arrived. As soon as they reach the southwestern tip of India and chafe against the mountains of Kerala, the clouds are forced upward and burst. The clouds trail along with their fat, rain-laden bellies, and it takes very little to tear them open: an obstacle, perhaps a few mountains. It has traveled thousands of kilometers across the Indian Ocean, becoming saturated with water vapor. The air in May is hot and humid as it moves to the southwest after crossing the equator over the Indian subcontinent.
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