By IANS
New Delhi : As the monsoon covers most of the country, there is a new way you can study, track and better understand this South Asian phenomenon – online.
Called 'Monsoon On Line' (MOL), a venture by scientists in cyberspace, is now available via the site of the Pune-based Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology.
The MOL web site promises to be "the definitive information source for monitoring and forecasting the Asian monsoons". It notes that the Asian summer monsoon "affects the lives of 60 percent of the world population and has a major controlling effect on world food production".
Located at the tropmet.res.in site, MOL looks at past and present monsoons and offers links to various other monsoon-related information available online. It also gives rainfall charts – on an all-India daily or weekly, or station-basis.
In addition, it has monsoon monitoring pages and details of the recent monsoons – between 1997 and 2006. Other features include monsoon forecasting and a bibliography on Asian monsoons.
The monsoon, or the rainy season, has lasting climatic effects. It refers to both the wet monsoon and the dry monsoon experienced periodically in South Asia and Southeast Asia.
In hydrology, 'monsoonal' rainfall is considered to be that which occurs in any region that receives the majority of its rain during a particular season. There are monsoons in North America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Brazil and East Asia as well.
The MOL site was created by K. Rupa Kumar and J.V. Revadekar of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology at Pune and D.B. Stephenson and E. Black of the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading in Britain.
"Much of (the currently available) information is neither grouped together intelligently nor interpreted in any particular way. There are many pages containing climate information but it often tends to be scattered all over the place," say the creators of this site.
They also acknowledge that a problem with many large institutions is they feel "the need to have aesthetically pleasing web sites yet these sites often contain very little useable information".
In August 1997, this team started their first thematic web site for prediction of the Asian summer monsoon. "It seemed like a good way to tidy up both our bookmarks and our offices at the same time and it allows one to keep track of the monsoon at one easy click of a mouse button. The site has been very well received," said a team member.
Recently, Australia-based T. Matthew Ciolek of The Asian Studies WWW Monitor, which is run out of The Australian National University, Canberra, rated the site's scholarly usefulness at the highest-ranked "essential" category.