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Cyclones in the North Indian Ocean in a Changing Climate
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Mr. Vineet Singh*
Email: vineetsingh.jrf@tropmet.res.in
India is a country with a vast coastline that is home to millions of people living all along the coasts. With the development of the country,
variousbigcitieshaveemergedallalongthe coast, such as Kolkata, Chennai, Surat, etc. For many decades, cyclones have posed a major threat to the coastline of India. The deadly Odisha super cyclone in October 1999, which led to a casualty of roughly 10,000 people and devastated vast infrastructure, showed how disastrous these cyclones could be for the country.
Since my graduation way back in 2012, whenever I saw a cyclone affecting the Indian coastline, I used to wonder how these cyclones could be so intense, what caused such high winds in these cyclones and why these cyclones did not penetrate
much inland but were generally restricted to the coasts. Since then, I developed a fantasy about knowing about these cyclones through newspaper articles, college libraries, etc. I started keeping a record of the cyclones manually by checking the news. Then, when I got access to the Internet, I started searching cyclone statistics that affected India and made a log of all the recent cyclones. In the final year of my graduation, I started making my mind to explore the mysteries of cyclones and to do research in this field. Masters in AtmosphericSciencewasmyfirstmajorstep in this direction, and a new journey of learning about cyclones began.
At present, as a Ph.D. student, I worked on cyclones in the North Indian Ocean (the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea) in a changing
* Mr. Vineet Singh, PhD Scholar from Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Maharashtra, is pursuing his research on “Cyclones in the North Indian Ocean in a Changing Climate”. His popular science story entitled “Cyclones in the North Indian Ocean in a Changing Climate” has been selected for AWSAR Award