The seasonal and diurnal behavior of atmospheric submicron aerosol was studied in the northern Indian city of Kanpur in the Indo Gangetic Plain during July 2006–May 2007. The size distribution and mass concentration of the aerosol in the range of 15-700 nm was measured using a scanning mobility particle sizer (SMPS). Simultaneously, black carbon (BC) measurement was made using an aethalometer. ...

Indian monsoon rainfall is vital for a large share of the world’s population. Both reliably projecting India’s future precipitation and unraveling abrupt cessations of monsoon rainfall found in paleorecords require improved understanding of its stability properties. While details of monsoon circulations and the associated rainfall are complex, full-season failure is dominated by large-scale pos...

[1] Observations of 408 monsoon low-pressure systems (MLPSs) including 196 monsoon depressions (MDs) that formed in the Bay of Bengal during the 1951–2007 period, and the gridded analysis of daily rainfall fields for the same period, were used to identify the association of antecedent rainfall (1 week average rainfall prior to the genesis of MLPS) with the genesis of MLPS and length of inland p...

Analysis of suspended sediment transport data for rivers in Yunnan and Tibet shows that monsoon fl ows control effective discharge. We calculate effective discharge, defi ned as the discharge that transports the most sediment, for 44 stations for which there is at least one complete year of daily suspended sediment concentration and mean daily discharge data, and fi nd that the effective discha...

Precipitation over India is driven by the Indian monsoon. Although changes in this atmospheric circulation are caused by the differential seasonal diabatic heating of Asia and the Indo-Pacific Ocean, it is so far unknown how global warming influences the monsoon rainfalls regionally. Herein, we present a Miocene pollen flora as the first direct proxy for monsoon over southern India during the M...

[1] It is commonly believed that greenhouse-gas-induced global warming can weaken the east Asian winter monsoon but strengthen the summer monsoon, because of stronger warming over high-latitude land as compared to low-latitude oceans. In this study, we show that the surface wind speed associated with the east Asian monsoon has significantly weakened in both winter and summer in the recent three...

Soft-bottom macrobenthic diversity and community structure were assessed at Mumbai and Jawaharlal Nehru ports during three different periods between 2001 and 2002 (November 2001 post-monsoon 1, April/May 2002 pre-monsoon, and October 2002 post-monsoon 2). A total of 43 macrobenthic invertebrate species belonging to five phyla were recorded. Macrofaunal abundance (PM1 186, PreM 106, and PM2 31 i...

The East Asian summer monsoon controls the climatic regime of an extended region through temperature and precipitation changes. As the East Asian summer monsoon is primarily driven by the northern hemisphere summer insolation, such meteorological variables are expected to significantly change on the orbital timescale, influencing the composition of terrestrial sediments in terms of both mineral...

The variability of the north Australian wet season is examined by performing cluster analysis on the wind and thermodynamic information contained in the 2300 UTC radiosonde data at Darwin for 49 wet seasons (September–April) from 1957/58 to 2005/06. Five objectively derived regimes of the wet season are obtained and are found to differ significantly in their synoptic environment, cloud patterns...

Monsoon is the major manifestation of the seasonal cycle in the tropical regions, and there is a wide range of evidence from marine and terrestrial data that monsoon characteristics are affected by changes in the Earth’s orbital parameters. We consider 3 periods in the Eemian and 3 in the Holocene that present some analogy in the Earth’s orbital configuration in terms of obliquity and precessio...