India stares at 35% monsoon deficit
Over a week past the monsoon’s normal arrival date, the rain clouds have yet to reach Mumbai, driving India’s nationwide monsoon deficit to 35% on
Over a week past the monsoon’s normal arrival date, the rain clouds have yet to reach Mumbai, driving India’s nationwide monsoon deficit to 35% on June 16. The shortfall in rainfall is concentrated in the regions the monsoon has failed to cover — Maharashtra, the Konkan coast, and the adjoining regions of central India — where its northward progress has been stalled for several days. India Meteorological Department (IMD) statistics show that, apart from northwest India, which has received 5% more rain than normal for this time of the year, all other regions are in the red, including east and northeast India (43%), central India (63%), and the southern peninsula (14%). Super El Niño year While a rainfall deficit in June, the first of the monsoon months, is not unusual, it assumes additional significance in a year that forecasters globally have warned will likely be a ‘Super El Niño’ year. Also Read: Why is the El Niño so hard to predict? An analysis of the IMD’s all-India June rainfall departures for El Niño years since 2000 shows no consistent early-season signal. In June 2015, during one of the strongest El Niño events on record, rainfall was 14% above normal. June 2002 and June 2004, both years that ended in drought, recorded near-normal June rainfall of around 2% and 1% above normal, respectively, with the deficits arriving only in July and later. Only in 2009 (47% below normal) and 2014 (44% below normal) did June rainfall fail as sharply as it has this year.
In 2023, the most recent El Niño year, June closed about 8% below normal, within the IMD’s normal range. An El Niño event — the periodic warming of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean that tends to suppress the Indian monsoon — establishes itself only in the spring and exerts its influence mainly in the middle and later part of the season. “June rainfall and the pace of onset, by contrast, are governed largely by local and regional factors,” according to D.S. Pai, chief forecaster at the IMD’s Regional Meteorological Centre in Chennai. First pulse lost momentum This year, the monsoon set in over Kerala on June 4, just three days behind its normal date, but its advance up the west coast has since lost momentum. Dr. Pai explained that the monsoon moves in pulses, and the first pulse, having reached the outskirts of Mumbai, did not sustain itself. Instead, an “anticyclonic circulation” to the city’s north, combined with a westerly push from mid-latitude weather systems, has prevented the monsoon from establishing itself, he told The Hindu. The Madden-Julian Oscillation, a travelling band of atmospheric activity that can strengthen or weaken the monsoon, is currently in an “unfavourable phase”. This implies that the onset over Mumbai is likely to be delayed by a further five to six days, until the next pulse strengthens, possibly aided by a low-pressure system forming over the Bay of Bengal, he reckoned. Dire warnings The U.S. Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued an El Niño advisory on June 11, confirming the event had formed and placing the odds of it becoming “very strong” by winter at 63%.
The BriefWire