Snow still no-show in Kashmir: A telltale effect of global warming killing Western Disturbance

Omar Abdullah recently expressed his disbelief on X when he learnt about a snowless Gulmarg that used to attract avid skiers. But he was not alone in being shocked by the dry winter spell in the Himalayas. What the former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister reported about Gulmarg, has also been experienced by the visitors to Gangotri glacier or Kufri, outside Shimla. The locations, which were earlier covered with layers of snow by mid-January, are bone dry this year.

The entire western Himalayas has been witnessing a prolonged dry spell with barely any hope for a revival in the next two weeks. This, according to the meteorologists, is due to the absence of strong Western Disturbances (WD), a storm that originates in the Mediterranean and travels across Asia.

For a long time, the WDs have played a key role in shaping Indian weather. If the WDs are intense, they bring rain in the plains, and snow uphill. But there has not been any major activity this time, even though a couple of feeble ones have occurred and a few more are expected. This winter strong WD currents have not entered India, thanks to global warming.

“Snowfalls happen due to the WDs, but the frequencies of WDs have reduced as the mid-latitude jet streams causing such circulations are moving north towards the polar region due to global warming,” says M Rajeevan, veteran weather scientist and former secretary at the Union Ministry of Earth Sciences.

Jet streams are fast-flowing, narrow, meandering air currents in the atmosphere having a strong influence on local weather. The western disturbances are embedded in the mid-latitude subtropical westerly jet streams. With temperature increasing, such systems are going further north, robbing the country of crucial winter precipitations.

“This gives a clear image of how global warming is adversely affecting us,” Rajeevan tells DH. “Such trends are expected in the next 30-40 years, and we need strategies to cope because the absence of snowfall will lead to water scarcity.”

Data collected by some of the IMD weather stations in J&K, like the ones in Gulmarg and Srinagar, also reveal a declining trend.

The two WDs expected in the next two weeks can bring some light snowfall in the upper reaches and rainfall in the plains. They are, however, unlikely to make up for the shortage in the western Himalayas. Even in the eastern states like Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, the winter saw only minor snowfall.

The officials at IMD Dehradun say that Uttarakhand witnessed a 66% deficiency in precipitation – rainfall in the plains and snowfall in areas above 3000 metres – in November and a 75% shortage in December. The deficiency stood at 52% after the monsoon season. “The last time we had such poor snowfall was in 2008-09,” says Bikram Singh, who heads the IMD office in Dehradun.

The IMD officials in Shimla also note that the snowfall level was on a decline in Himachal Pradesh in the last three years, barring 2021. The state with popular tourist destinations Shimla, Kullu-Manali, Kufri, Narkonda, Dalhousie and Dharamshala saw nearly 80% less rainfall in December 2023.

Rajeevan says that the frequency of WD generally increases before the onset of the El Nino in an El Nino year. That is the reason last winter saw a reasonably good number of such systems bringing snow. But global warming seems to have taken over this time, he adds.