La Nina to bring rain, floods during elections: weatherman

Tuesday, 17 August 2010 21:54 Mizzima News

Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – The Burmese junta’s date of November 7 for the first general elections in two decades coincides La Nina weather event, a global weather phenomenon that exacerbates wet or dry conditions. For Burma the trend during the event is usually wetter and cooler, and is expected to cause heavy rainfall and flooding, the country’s top weatherman says.
“La Nina will bring heavy rainfall … it will take affect from in Burma from November to February and will be very strong during that period,” Dr. Tun Lwin of the Meteorology and Hydrology Department said.

The effects of La Nina had reached Burma and if they continued in the country during the next two months, we could expect it will be strongest in the late monsoon, he said.

He told The Voice Weekly journal that people needed to be cautious about the possible flooding near in the nation’s main rivers including the Irrawaddy, and the Chindwin and estimated that October and November, in the run-up and during the elections would be critical time.

La Niña is characterised by unusually cool water temperatures in the equatorial central and eastern Pacific Ocean and can cause heavy rain, flooding, landslides and storms, but El Nino is its opposite, with the warming of water in the Pacific.

La Niña translates from the Spanish as “The Girl”, and in very general terms, will mean that those parts of the world that normally experience dry weather will be drier and those with wet weather will be wetter. Atlantic and Pacific hurricane activity will increase with La Niña and the effects of severe droughts are likely in those already dry parts of the world.

Burma suffered record-breaking hot weather last summer because of El Nino.

Eight days before the junta’s referendum on May 10 in 2008, Cyclone Nargis struck Burma, killed about 140,000 people and displaced about 2.5 million.