Abstract
IN NATURE, vol. xxiii. p. 400, Mr. F. Chambers very properly points out that the winter rains of Northern India, though usually heaviest in years when the mean pressure is above the average, are yet coincident with short periods of low rather than of high pressure. The way in which Mr. Chambers accounts for the low pressure seems, however, rather far-fetched. It is true that on one or two of the American weather charts storm tracks are shown extending from the Mediterranean to Northern India or the Bay of Bengal, but these paths are drawn with dotted lines indicating that they are doubtful, and, considering the absence of meteorological stations in the greater part of the area between the Mediterranean and India, and the nature of the intervening country—especially Afghanistan with its high mountains—I should say the evidence upon the strength of which the American chartographer laid down these storm tracks, was of the slightest possible description. The winter rains are however accompanied by a cyclonic movement of the air over Northern India, and I wish to point out that, whether the cyclonic disturbance be a European or Transatlantic visitor, as Mr. Chambers supposes, or a native of the Indian region, generated by the rainfall, as Mr. Eliot has taught in his report for 1877, the “old motion” of the connection of the rains with the upper anti-monsoon current is by no means exploded. The progress of the disturbance and of the rainfall is usually from north-west to south-east, and the rainfall is heaviest, as a rule, on the eastern side of the disturbance. The winds which bring the rainfall therefore come from some southerly quarter, and as northerly winds generally continue blowing in the extreme south of India at the time when these disturbances occur in the north, the southerly rainy winds must be derived from an upper current which descends in the anti-cyclone or region of high pressure in the centre and south of India, or in the zone between the south of India and the equator. Mr. Blanford's modification of his former views regarding the origin of these rains appears from his remarks and the accompanying charts in the Meteorological Report for 1878 to be merely that the indraught towards the region of precipitation is not confined to Northern India, but is occasionally, though rarely, felt as far south as Ceylon.
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HILL, S. The Indian Winter Rains. Nature 23, 604 (1881). https://doi.org/10.1038/023604b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/023604b0
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