Special Report by Minoli De Soysa

Children splashing in the rain, flooded streets, unruly umbrellas and drenched people are perennial images of life in South Asia.

After the stifling heat of summer, the cooling rains are welcome– except that once they start, they seem never ending. The monsoon season that has now hit Bangladesh will continue until August. It does not rain all the time - the first downpours are usually followed by clear skies. The air smells better and the city is greener and cleaner.

The word monsoon means season in Arabic. Every summer, cool, moisture-laden winds from the Indian Ocean are pulled on to the warm land. The big difference between the temperature of the ocean and the land causes monsoons.

When the Indian continent heats up in early summer, the hot air rises. The cooler air from the oceans then moves onshore to replace the hotter air. This cool, moist air warms and rises. When the moisture rises, it condenses in the form of rain or snow. That air keeps flowing inland until it hits the Himalayan mountain range in the north. Because the Himalayas are so high, the moisture-laden air is forced upward even higher. While the wind continues over and around the Himalayas into Tibet, the clouds from all the moisture-laden air do not. The clouds, which accumulate on the southern side of the mountains, dump all their rain over the Indian continent

In Bangladesh, 70 percent of the land goes under water during the monsoons. For farmers, it is a good thing because the worn soil is replenished with nutrients. In many parts of the country, however, the heavy rains bring chaos in their wake. Not only do the streets of Dhaka become even more impossible to navigate, but floods in the countryside sometimes lead to a heavy loss of life, property and crops. The fact that the country has the highest population density in the world as well as few resources to manage floods does not help.

In Central Bangladesh, the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna Rivers come together to form the largest river delta in the world. When the monsoon is stronger than usual, the entire area becomes a vast floodplain. In addition, the snowmelt from the Himalayas adds more water to the already swollen rivers. The flat, low-lying land makes flooding all the more likely. The last great flood was in 1998 when 16 million people were made homeless. In Dhaka, even houses on high ground were flooded and the airport was shut down because it was covered in water.

Those of us who live in Bangladesh maybe think that it is the wettest place on earth. But this honour actually belongs to Cherrapunji, in north-eastern India which receives the highest rainfall. Cherrapunji is about ten times as rainy as Seattle, which is one of the rainiest cities in the United States. Seattle gets about a meter of rain each year. In contrast, the annual average for rainfall in Cherrapunji is about 10 meters.

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