India: Following 6th hottest year since 1901, heat warnings issued for 2019
By Chaitanya Mallapur
Even before the weather department issued heatwave warnings on April 1, 2019, on complete onset of summer, temperatures in March 2019 had soared to unusually high levels across India.
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The annual mean surface air temperature across the country in 2018 was 0.39 degrees Celcius above the average observed between 1981 and 2010.
The average maximum temperatures during April and June this summer are likely to be higher than normal by 0.5 degrees Celcius over most of the meteorological subdivisions in central India and some subdivisions in northwest India, an India Meteorological Department (IMD) release on April 1, 2019, said.
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By 2017, 11 states--Odisha, Telangana, Bihar, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Haryana, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh--and 17 cities had adopted or were developing heat action plans. Extended forecasts were being provided to more than 300 cities, Vardhan said in an another Lok Sabha reply on February 4, 2019.
Heatwave deaths declined by 97% over two years from 700 in 2016 to 20 in 2018 due to improved forecast and heat action plans, another Lok Sabha reply on February 6, 2019, said.
“It is true that heat-health warning systems have played an extremely important role in reducing deaths,” Hem Dholakia, senior research associate at the Delhi-based Council On Energy, Environment And Water, told IndiaSpend. “These need to scale up.”
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