July Rainfall Ends Near Normal Despite El Niño: Why IMD’s Forecast Missed The Mark
July Rainfall Ends Near Normal Despite El Niño: Why IMD’s Forecast Missed The Mark Reported By, Last Updated: August 01, 2026, 08:51 IST Monthly rainfall
July Rainfall Ends Near Normal Despite El Niño: Why IMD’s Forecast Missed The Mark Reported By, Last Updated: August 01, 2026, 08:51 IST Monthly rainfall in July ended with a 1 per cent surplus, against the weather department’s prediction of a deficit of at least 6 per cent. Rapid Read As many as 344 districts, or 46%, still ended with deficient rainfall across India. Despite the shadow of El Niño, India has received ‘near-normal’ rainfall in July, beating the India Meteorological Department’s (IMD) monthly forecast of below-normal rain. The month ended with a 1% rainfall surplus, against the prediction of a 6% deficiency. According to the weather department’s forecast, rainfall in July was likely to be below normal — less than 94% of the long-period average (LPA) — following India’s fifth-driest June since 1901. However, rainfall activity gathered pace in July and significantly reduced the staggering deficit of 40% in June, revised to 35.4%, to nearly 13% in July. “El Niño is not the only factor that decides monsoon output. Clearly, it did not have any impact in July, though some deficit persists in the northern plains and southern peninsula," said IMD chief Dr Mrityunjay Mohapatra. Elaborating on why the IMD got its forecast wrong, he said, “Even if I agree that the all-India average rainfall prediction has gone wrong to some extent, it has not gone wrong completely.
It is true that we got 1% above-normal or near-normal rainfall in July, when we had predicted a deficiency of at least 6%. But this rainfall was not uniformly distributed across India. We had correctly predicted a rain deficiency over the northern plains, parts of the southern peninsula and the north-east." As many as 344 districts, or 46%, still ended with deficient rainfall across India, mostly in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Telangana, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan and the north-eastern states. Overall, the southern peninsula is still reeling under a deficit of nearly 23%, along with a deficit of 29% in east and north-eastern India. As many as 17 of the 36 subdivisions experienced a rainfall deficit, according to the data. Why Did The Forecast Go Wrong? The top weather scientist attributed the discrepancy to intra-seasonal variations within the monsoon season, marked by multiple low-pressure systems from the Bay of Bengal. Despite moderate El Niño conditions over the equatorial Pacific Ocean and a neutral Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) — both unfavourable for the monsoon — four low-pressure systems, or rain-bearing systems, formed in the Bay of Bengal and moved westwards, sweeping across central India. Two of them even intensified into ‘depressions’, causing increased rainfall over states such as Odisha, Maharashtra and Gujarat.
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