Climate of India

Hello all! Welcome back to our geologic trip through India. The focus of this blog will be on the weather in India. India is in the northern hemisphere, conveniently placed in between the latitudes of 0 degrees and 30 degrees. The significance of this is that India is very warm due to how close it is to the direct rays of the sun.

This picture shows the placement of India with latitude and longitude. Photo from
http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/india_map.html

In this stretch of the world the world’s air, the cold air is descending from the high altitude and warming on the surface. This is from hadley cells. Hadley cells are cells that are hot air that rises, eventually the air cools. When the air cools the air falls and creates little cells around major latitudes.

These are the hadley cells moving up and down the Earth. These help promote warm weather around the country India because the warm air is moving closer to the equator, which is with warm air. Photo courtesy of http://www.atomosyd.net/spip.php?article42

This makes this stretch of land tropic in nature but in the chart below, you can see the climate ranges anywhere from arid to humid subtropical on the country. The warm air warms this area, making India a fairly hot place to be.

This map shows the multiple climates around India, for the most part India is a warm and wet area due to the warm current and the monsoon seasons in the summer months. These are helped by the ITCZ moving upward in the earth's latitude. Photo courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:India_climatic_zone_map_en.svg

Besides being in between the equator and the subtropical humid zones, India is surrounded by a warm ocean current that makes an already warm and wet area on the coasts, with the ITCZ this creates the monsoon season. This is because the intertropical convergence zone, the area of heavy storms around the equator, moves up in latitude due to the Earth’s tilt. The combination of these two creates a very humid storm, one that lingers for the summer months. The fact that they get the added moisture in the summer it is easy to see why the winter months can be very dry like the upper portion of the country. India has a very interesting climate and there is only more to discover. Until next time!