While several States reel under heatwaves, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has forecast a bountiful monsoon for the year. In a press briefing on April 15, the agency has forecast that the rains in June-September will be 6% more than the annual average of 87 cm during these months.
Last year, El Nino – a warming of the Central Pacific and usually linked to diminished rainfall in India – dented India’s monsoon by 6%. This year, the El Nino has not yet fully faded but is expected to do so by June and progress to La Nina, a converse cooling effect that’s usually linked to surplus rainfall by the second half of the monsoon (August and September), said IMD Director-General Mrutunjay Mahapatra.
The IMD uses multiple approaches to forecast the monsoon. One is to use statistical associations and draw upon its vast historical database of over 150 years to correlate certain global meteorological parameters such as ocean temperatures and snow cover in Europe etc. to the performance of the monsoon. The other way is to use the dynamical approach, or simulating the weather across the globe on a particular day, and having powerful computers crunch the numbers to extrapolate this weather into any future day or time period desired. Both these models indicated a similar outlook for the monsoon this year, said M. Ravichandran, Secretary, the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES).
