Karnataka
Karnataka Geography & Climate
Geography
Karnataka spans the Arabian Sea coast, the Western Ghats and the southern Deccan plateau, which gives it an unusual range for a single state.
The boulder country
Around Hampi the landscape is granite — among the oldest exposed rock on earth at around three billion years — weathered into vast rounded boulders stacked in improbable piles across low hills. The Tungabhadra river runs through it. The Vijayanagara builders quarried from and built among these outcrops, splitting blocks with wedges along drilled lines that are still visible.
The Western Ghats
The escarpment runs down the state’s western edge and is a UNESCO-listed biodiversity hotspot, holding the largest populations of Asian elephant and tiger in India. Agumbe on the seaward slope is among the wettest places in the country.
The coast
Around 320 kilometres of Arabian Sea shore — beaches, estuaries and laterite headlands — with a narrow strip between the sea and the escarpment.
The plateau
The Deccan interior is drier, at 600 to 900 metres, black cotton soil in the north and red soil in the south, and includes India’s only working gold field at Kolar, now closed.
The rivers
The Kaveri rises in Coorg and runs south-east into Tamil Nadu, and the sharing of its water between the two states is one of the longest-running and most bitterly fought interstate disputes in India, periodically producing protests and shutdowns in Bengaluru. The Krishna and its tributary the Tungabhadra drain the north; the Tungabhadra reservoir upstream of Hampi irrigates a large area of otherwise dry country.
Jog Falls
The Sharavathi drops 253 metres in four separate streams, spectacular in the monsoon.
Climate Patterns
Karnataka has three climates separated by the Western Ghats.
The coast and Ghats
Extremely wet in the monsoon. The seaward slopes receive several metres between June and September, and Agumbe is sometimes called the Cherrapunji of the south for the same reason. The coast is hot and humid year round, 24 to 33°C.
The southern plateau
Bengaluru sits at about 920 metres, which gives it one of the most agreeable climates of any large Indian city — 20 to 30°C for most of the year, cool evenings, and a reputation as a garden city that its residents defend. It receives moderate rain from both the south-west and north-east monsoons.
The northern plateau
Hot and dry, in the rain shadow of the Ghats. Hampi and the northern districts exceed 40°C from March to May, and the granite radiates heat well after dark. Rainfall is under 700 millimetres and drought is recurrent.
The monsoon
June to September is the main season, with a second north-east monsoon bringing rain to the south-east in October and November.
Bengaluru’s changing weather
The garden-city climate is measurably warming as the built area expands, and the city now swings between water scarcity in the dry months and flash flooding in the rains, as lake beds and drainage channels have been built over. Both make the news regularly and both affect visitors — the flooding in particular can shut roads for hours.
Practical effect
Hampi and the northern sites should be seen between November and February; the Ghats and the coast are best from October to March.