Monsoon In The Making

From the mythological flood stories of ancient cultures to the annual flooding of Earth's mightiest rivers, life-giving water can be a raging torrent of death and destruction. Flood and Monsoon Alert! examines how these devastating natural disasters occur and how people cope with their devastation.

The 21st century promises to be an era dominated by international response to c- tain global environmental challenges such as climate change, depleting biodiversity and biocapacity as well as general atmospheric, water and soil pollution problems. Consequently, Environmental decision making (EDM) is a socially important ?eld of development for Operations Research and Management Science (OR/MS). - certainty is an important feature of these decision problems and it intervenes at very different time and space scales. The Handbook on “Uncertainty and Environmental Decision Making” provides a guided tour of selected methods and tools that OR/MS offer to deal with these issues. Below, we brie?y introduce, peer reviewed, chapters of this handbook and the topics that are treated by the invited authors. The ?rst chapter is a general introduction to the challenges of environmental decision making, the use of OR/MS techniques and a range of tools that are used to deal with uncertainty in this domain.

El Nino has been with us for centuries, but now we can forcast it, and thus can prepare far in advance for the extreme climatic events it brings. The emerging ability to forecast climate may be of tremendous value to humanity if we learn how to use the information well. How does society cope with seasonal-to-interannual climatic variations? How have climate forecasts been usedâ€"and how useful have they been? What kinds of forecast information are needed? Who is likely to benefit from forecasting skill? What are the benefits of better forecasting? This book reviews what we know about these and other questions and identifies research directions toward more useful seasonal-to-interannual climate forecasts. In approaching their recommendations, the panel explores: Vulnerability of human activities to climate. State of the science of climate forecasting. How societies coevolved with their climates and cope with variations in climate. How climate information should be disseminated to achieve the best response. How we can use forecasting to better manage the human consequences of climate change.

Set against the turbulence leading to the Arab Spring, Glyn Sumner and his comrades have unexpected encounters in Tunis, profoundly affecting their futures. On sojourn, Sumner and the crew of the schooner Poseidon voyage around the Med. Finding solace away from the ever-imposing regulations and sterility of Blighty, they experience transcendence and seminal life in North African ports. Tunis brings bewildering confrontations for the crew with Saleh, an Ethiopian asylum seeker suspected of crime and terrorist involvement, and Chief of Police Colonel Nassar, responsible for homeland security. Off Sicily, Poseidon’s crew witnesses an asylum seeker sea rescue by the coast guard. They wonder if Saleh is aboard, or whether he is shaking hands with Neptune. Glyn ponders if the dark side also beckons them, visions of a European dystopia on the horizon.

A Kirkus Reviews' Best Picture Book, 2018 Mina loves to play soccer all year round. Nothing comes close to it. But when the monsoon arrives, Mina is stuck indoors and she can’t help feeling restless and bored. Her ammi doesn’t understand. The doodhwalla doesn’t understand. That’s when Mina decides she’ll find ways of chasing away the clouds herself. In doing so, she makes an unexpected discovery. Soccer will never be the same again for Mina! In a charming story that any kid who loves a sport will relate to, soccer-mad Mina tries just about any trick to stop the monsoon clouds from raining on her game. In doing so, she shows us glimpses of her life in a village in eastern India, highlighting the important role played by monsoon rains in this part of the world. The heart of the story, however, is the bond forged between a mother and her daughter on a gray, gloomy day.

An edited volume by Monsoon Assemblages, a European Research Council funded research project. The book presents the methods that Monsoon Assemblages has evolved for engaging the monsoon, a globally connected weather system, as a coproducer of urban life and space in South and Southeast Asian cities. It challenges views of climate as an inert backdrop to urban life, instead suggesting that it is materially and spatially active in shaping urban politics, ecologies, infrastructures, buildings and bodies. It combines critical texts with cartography, photography and ethnography to present the project’s methodology and its outcomes and invites urban practitioners to think differently about space, time, representation and human and non-human agency. It offers intra-disciplinary, intra-active methods for rethinking human and non-human relations with weather in ways that meet the challenges of climate change and the Anthropocene.

A detailed review of climate change and its impacts on farming systems since the Neolithic, including anticipated future changes.

This is a timely, interdisciplinary scientific overview of the atmosphere, the ocean and the land surface as it interacts with physical, chemical and biological processes. The high level of detail sets it apart from other studies of monsoon meteorology. The text includes analysis of paleoclimate records, human influences on the monsoon climate and the economic impacts of the monsoon on economies and to human health.