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dam-l Floods caused by warmer ocean/LS
Note that recent news reports show that scientists have found that the
world's oceans are storing some of the heat from global warming and thus,
could also be a factor in the Southern African floods ...
SOUTHERN AFRICA FLOODS CAUSED BY WARM INDIAN OCEAN
JOHANNESBURG - Rains that have lashed southern Africa and prompted floods
that have displaced at least a million Mozambicans have been triggered by
exceptionally warm ocean water temperatures, a meteorologist said yesterday.
"Every single year at this time cyclones move through this area as tropical
low pressure systems form over the Indian Ocean and move west," Tracey Gill,
a meteorologist at the South African Weather Bureau in Pretoria, told
Reuters.
"They build their strength depending on the temperatures of the water....and
when Cyclone Eline passed over the Indian Ocean, the water temperature was
an exceptionally high 29 degrees Celcius," she said.
Other meteorologists have also pointed to water temperatures, noting that
sea surface temperatures over the Mozambican channel have been unusually
high.
Eline was the savage cyclone that struck Mozambique last week, exacerbating
floods caused by already heavy rain and compounding the misery in one of the
world's poorest nations.
Warm waters cause massive evaporation which prompts rising air and
intensifies the low pressure system, Gill said.
The torrential rains over the past four weeks have also flooded areas of
South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana, destroying crops and uprooting
communities in their wake.
Gill said scientists were unsure of the causes that lay behind the warming
of the ocean.
Meterologists say the La Nina weather pattern appears to have reached its
maturity and it is not usually associated with severe weather.
It is the opposite of the El Nino weather effect, the warming of the Pacific
Ocean every two to seven years that leads to extreme disruptions in normal
weather patterns.
Gill said scientists were now exploring possible links between El Nino's
warming of the Pacific Ocean's surface temperature and the current warming
of the Indian Ocean.
She also said models predict that Cyclone Gloria, which is currently
building up over the Indian Ocean, will weaken.
There have been fears that Gloria could bring a second wave of flooding to
Mozambique.
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
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Lori Pottinger, Director, Southern Africa Program,
and Editor, World Rivers Review
International Rivers Network
1847 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, California 94703, USA
Tel. (510) 848 1155 Fax (510) 848 1008
http://www.irn.org
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