It is Ashwin in Bangla calendar, officially autumn in Bangladesh and usually the season of benign sunlight. And so it happened for generations.
But things are different now.
Last week was hot with intense humidity. Profuse sweating drenched people. But yesterday it was like monsoon, drizzling and sometimes pouring down with rain the whole day.
This July was the driest in the decade, said the meteorological office. It prompted some farmers at Ramchandra village in Shadullahpur, Gaibandha to marry off frogs, a rainmaking ritual in the country. Foreign media also covered the event.
Though there are six seasons in Bangladesh, three of them–summer, monsoon and winter–are noticeable. The farmers of the country depend on their traditional knowledge.
Agronomists say the farmers, who have been ever intuitive about weather, fail to predict the rain nowadays.
Monsoon rains normally sweep Bangladesh from June to September, with the country receiving more than 75 percent of its annual rainfall.
In 2009, there were not enough monsoon rains in mid-July to enable farmers to prepare fields and transplant Aman rice. It didn’t rain until the beginning of August that year, which delayed the transplantation even though the seedlings were ready.
The weather is vital to a country where over 60 percent people depend on agriculture, said Zainul Abedin, president of Bangladesh Society of Agronomists, while talking about climate change and its impact on agriculture at a seminer.
Even this year farmers in many parts of the country did not have water in the rainy season to rot their jute, the golden fibre of Bangladesh.
“Farmers from far away, even from other upazila, came to our village to rot their jute. We were lucky that we had water,” said Yunus Hossain, a farmer of Gopalganj, over the telephone.
Not only in Bangladesh, this phenomenon happened in many other parts of the world.
In July, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) of the United States reported that June 2010 was the warmest June on record while 2010 is the warmest year ever recorded.
Meteorology experts observe that it is proven that the mean temperature of the country is increasing.
The Dhaka Met office found a trend of temperature rise in every season analysing 55 years’ weather data between 1951 and 2005. The annual mean temperature also has shown a rising tendency, said meteorologist Shameem Hassan Bhuiyan.
The geographical position of the country is an important factor as the Himalayas is in the North and the Bay of Bengal lies in the south.
“So if the temperature increases, it creates convection clouds that cause long dry spell and short spell of heavy rainfall. It is happening in some parts of the country,” said Shameem.
Besides, the mounting temperature is causing rise in the sea level, which only adds to the sufferings of the farmers, observed agronomists.
Water levels rose by at least 5.6 mm a year at Hiron point, 1.4 mm at Cox’s Bazar and 2.9 mm at Khepupara, they said citing 2008 data from Bangladesh Water Development Board.
In the recent years, extreme natural calamities have caused mammoth loss of life and assets as well as economic losses, said Ainun Nishat at a seminar a few days ago.
“All these are happening due to climate change. The weather is acting weird not only in Bangladesh, but in the other parts of the world,” he said, adding that most unusually the temperature of Moscow, Russia, was more than that of Dhaka this summer.
India, Pakistan, China, the Middle East and many European countries are also experiencing unusual weather events, he said
