RAS question
The Koppen climate classification system classifies India's climate as predominantly:
Correct answer: (B) 'Aw' (Tropical Wet and Dry/Savanna) for most of peninsular India.
In the Koppen climate classification, most of peninsular India is classified as Aw, or tropical wet-and-dry savanna climate.
Explanation
Koppen's system classifies climates using temperature and precipitation patterns, so India's varied rainfall and seasonal temperature regimes produce several climatic types rather than one label for the whole country. The official geography support material lists Aw, tropical savannah, for most of the peninsular plateaus south of the Tropic of Cancer. This matches the standard RAS framing: most of peninsular India falls under Aw, while other regions shift into Am along the western coast and the north-east, Af in parts of the Western Ghats, BSh and BWh in drier western India, Cwa across the Indo-Gangetic plain, and E in the higher Himalayas. The word 'predominantly' is therefore doing the work: it points to the broad peninsular pattern, not to every Indian region.
Why the other options are wrong
- (A) BWh is the hot-desert type associated with the Thar and western Rajasthan, so it cannot describe most of India.
- (C) Af, tropical rainforest climate, applies only to limited high-rainfall areas such as parts of the Western Ghats and the north-east, not the entire country.
- (D) Dfc is not the dominant Indian climate type; higher Himalayan areas are treated separately from the peninsular Aw belt and cover only a limited part of India.
Concept
This tests climatic regionalisation of India under Koppen's temperature-and-precipitation scheme. It recurs in RAS because Rajasthan's desert and semi-arid zones must be placed within India's wider monsoonal climate pattern.