ESSIC / AOSC professor Raghu Murtugudde has a new article on the India Science Wire about how an Indian mountain range provides moisture for monsoon rainfall. The mountain range, called the Western Ghats, is home to immense biodiversity, including vegetation that facilitates 25 percent of peninsular India’s rainfall through the process of evapotranspiration. Murtugudde contributed to a study about the process, which is published in Geophysical Research Letters. He notes that deforestation in the Western Ghats threatens both the area’s biodiversity and the rainfall process.
![Figure 3. Monthly TPW anomaly time series shown in red for ERA5 and blue for MiRS SNPP, 2012-2021. The straight lines are the linear regression fits. [a] is for global, [b] for Tropics, and [c] for mid-latitude regions, respectively.](https://essic.umd.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/grassotti-zhou-150x150.png)
