Not only is it getting hotter, it is getting stickier too!

The world is becoming more humid with climate change and global warming, latest research reveals. Scientists from the Met Office Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK have found strong evidence of human influence in inducing these changes in global surface humidity.

The scientists explored the causes of changes in humidity over the last 30 years and arrived at this conclusion. This increase in humidity will affect the distribution and maximum intensity of rainfall, as also of tropical cyclones. It also showed a corroboration with the global temperature rise.

The concentration of water vapour, a greenhouse gas, is expected to rise as the climate warms; this in turn will cause more global warming.

So is this increased water vapour content also the reason behind the excessive rains we are seeing in the State and other parts of India?

The All-India summer monsoon rainfall has not shown any trend so far but the extreme rainfall in Central India (daily rainfall > 100 mm/day) has increased by 50 percent in the last 50 years. 

Moderate rainfall has decreased during the same period. Hence the seasonal mean rainfall does not show any trend,” says Prof J Srinivasan, chairman, mechanical science division, IISc.

He adds that when the humidity of the atmosphere increases, the atmosphere becomes more unstable, and this promotes extreme rainfall.

 "Most climate models predict that the increase in CO2 will lead to an increase in summer monsoon rainfall during the next 50 years.”