NASA warns of melting ice caps; Mumbai, Mangalore at high risk of flooding

New Delhi: A NASA report has issued a warning for Mangalore in Karnataka and Mumbai saying that the two cities are in grave danger from floods due to melting ice caps.

Rainfall had heavily doused the two cities this season causing floods in many parts of the region. As per the report, India's southeastern coast in the state of Tamil Nadu witnessed up to 550 mm (21.7 inches) of rain in the past week, while total rainfall in southeastern India was measured at around 200 mm (7.9 inches).

NASA further confirmed information received from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center saying that computer models indicate that rains are expected to move in a northerly direction, wind speed is predicted at approximately 37 to 46.3 kilometers per hour, and with a minimum central pressure near 1004 millibars.

Moreover, the low-pressure continued to produce heavy rain in Tamil Nadu and in remote areas over south coastal Andhra Pradesh, NASA revealed.

The research, detailed in the journal Science Advances, could provide scientists a way to determine which ice sheets they should be "most worried about".

The researchers explained that as land ice is lost to the oceans, both the Earth's gravitational and rotational potentials are perturbed, resulting in strong spatial patterns in sea-level rise (SLR).

Over the next 100 years, the glacial melt may potentially rise Mangalore's sea levels by 15.98cm as and to 15.26cm in Mumbai and 10.65cm for New York, the research said.

These insights are based on data collected by a tool developed by NASA to forecast which cities are vulnerable to flooding due to the melting of ice in a warming climate.

“This provides, for each city, a picture of which glaciers, ice sheets, and ice caps are of specific importance,” researchers said, WION reported.

“As cities and countries attempt to build plans to mitigate flooding, they have to be thinking about 100 years in the future and they want to assess risk in the same way that insurance companies do,” said Erik Ivins, senior scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the US.