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Incessant Rainfall Event of June 2013 in Uttarakhand, India: Observational Perspectives

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Abstract

The Indian summer monsoon is a spectacular seasonal phenomenon on the globe. Large part of Indian summer monsoon rainfall is an outcome of various synoptic scale disturbances, many of which are extremely intense. Monthly and seasonal rainfall amounts are considered for describing general behaviour of summer monsoon. These amounts may give a misleading impression that monsoon is a robust and slowly evolving system. The mean rainfall, however, is the rainfall averaged over many sporadic weather events having spatial scales from 100 to 1,000 km (Stephenson et al. 1999). In past decade, there have been many instances of very heavy and extreme rainfall events over India (Rajeevan et al. 2008). Recently, in the month of June 2013, the state of Uttarakhand experienced heavy rainfall event owing to passage of well-formed synoptic systems. Incessant rainfall from 14 to 17 June 2013 accompanied with melting snow and Himalayan terrain resulted in flash floods in this region especially over Kedarnath valley and adjoining areas.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Dr. L.S. Rathore, Director General of Meteorology, India Meteorological Department, New Delhi for encouragement in research and being an enduring source of inspiration. Authors are thankful to Dr. S. Dutta, Scientist-E, IMD, Pune for helpful discussion.

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Correspondence to M. R. Ranalkar .

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Ranalkar, M.R., Chaudhari, H.S., Sawaisarje, G.K., Hazra, A., Pokhrel, S. (2015). Incessant Rainfall Event of June 2013 in Uttarakhand, India: Observational Perspectives. In: Ray, K., Mohapatra, M., Bandyopadhyay, B., Rathore, L. (eds) High-Impact Weather Events over the SAARC Region. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10217-7_20

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