It has been 11 days since the official onset of the monsoon but the rains have not yet arrived as expected
The southwest monsoon has not been very rainy in its first week, especially over Kerala and the northeastern states of Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura.
The distribution of rains in other regions where the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has announced the arrival of monsoon has also been uneven, hinting at a sluggish start to the most critical rainfall season for India’s economy, especially the agricultural sector.
IMD announced the onset of monsoon over Kerala on May 29, three days sooner than the normal of June 1. This announcement, though, has been contested by other weather watchers and Skymet, a private weather agency based in Noida.
It has been 11 days since the official onset of the monsoon but the rains have not yet arrived as expected. Some people on the microblogging site Twitter asked if the monsoon even arrived in Kerala.
Kerala and Manipur received really good rains in the days leading up to the monsoon season.
For Mizoram and Tripura, however, the dry trend of the pre-monsoon period continued into the monsoon season. This can lead to problems with water availability for the people, especially farmers looking to sow crops.
As many as 13 of the 15 districts of Kerala, all districts of Mizoram, six out of nine districts of Manipur and seven out of eight districts of Tripura have ‘deficient’ or ‘large deficient’ rainfall, according to IMD.
In the last week of May, the national weather agency had forecast low rainfall during the first week of monsoon for Kerala. But for northeast India, it predicted normal rainfall.
Rainfall was deficient in Kerala and the northeast in June last year as well because Cyclone Yaas had pulled the monsoon winds further northward and westward into other states, causing early floods in some like Bihar.
No such event has happened this year, which calls for concern over the lack of rainfall in the state right at the beginning of the season.
The situation in other regions where monsoon has arrived is also not very rosy. In Tamil Nadu, roughly half of the districts have deficient, large deficient or no rainfall. All three districts of coastal Karnataka, the rainiest part of the state, have recorded large deficient rainfall in this week.
IMD has forecast heavy rainfall for all these states beginning June 8, but whether the rainfall happens remains to be seen. Vineet Kumar of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune said “rains in the country expected to pick up after 14 June” on Twitter.
People of northwest and central India are in a dire scenario, with less-than-normal pre-monsoon rainfall and will have to further wait for monsoon rainfall to begin.
From March 1-May 31 this year, northwest India suffered a rainfall deficit of 63 per cent, central India 39 per cent and Telangana in south India 28 per cent.
This is because the Arabian Sea branch of the monsoon trough stalled after May 31 and the Bay of Bengal branch stalled after June 3.
Earlier, the Bay of Bengal branch had stalled between May 20 and May 30, after which it moved and covered northeast India by June 3. The meteorological reasons for the slow progress of the monsoon and the lack of rainfall are not known as of now.
On May 31, IMD had forecast normal monsoon rains throughout India in June. Countrywide deficit in rainfall in the first week of June is 37 per cent, with huge deficits in northwest and central India.
“It is not clear if June deficit is becoming a trend in terms of a weaker monsoon circulation,” said Raghu Murtugudde, a climate scientist at the University of Maryland, United States.
“The same factor that favours late pre-monsoon cyclones may be continuing into weak June rainfall, but one has to study this carefully,” he added.
He also highlighted that the study would be made rather difficult by the cyclonic rainfall getting intermixed with monsoon rainfall, which happened both in 2020 and partly in 2021.
If the rains do not pick up in the next few weeks then the country could be staring at a huge deficit in June rainfall, according to experts.
Down To Earth had earlier reported that the progress of the monsoon over India would be slow and the first two months would remain dry, an ominous prediction that may come true.
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