El Nino Fails To Cloud Monsoon

The phenomenal warming of Pacific ocean waters, nicknamed El Nino, which is causing considerable disquiet the world over because of its possible adverse impact on global weather patterns and crop production, continues to be unfavourable even for the south-west monsoon. The El Nino has, however, not caused much deviation in rainfall.

A top monsoon expert of the India Meteorological Department (IMD) told the Business Standard that El Nino had been unfavourable since April and this factor had been taken into account while computing the long-range monsoon forecast.

The monsoon has so far behaved along expected lines.

El Nino is currently being widely talked about in the international commodity market circles which perceive some major fluctuations in the supplies of different agro-products as also their prices.

While the rise in temperature in the eastern equatorial Pacific is being viewed as a good news for the U S farm economy because of anticipated favourable weather in the countrys mid-west agricultural tracts, it portends ill for crops in some major farm powers, including Australia and China.

However, the IMD does not yet perceive any El Nino-related alarming indications. In fact, there is no one-to-one linkage between the occurrence of El Nino and bad monsoon in India, the IMD spokesman said.

Though most of the bad monsoon years had an unfavourable El Nino, but the reverse is not true. Every El Nino year had not been a bad monsoon year. The monsoon had been poor at times even without El Nino, he said. El Nino had burst into the limelight in Indian circles in 1987 when it was unfavourable and the country faced one of the centurys worst droughts.

In any case, El Nino is one of the 16 parameters that are taken into reckoning for computing monsoon forecast using the recently developed statistical model.

This years monsoon was held to be normal with the total rainfall being around 92 per cent of the long-term average.

The IMD had also predicted a delayed onset of the monsoon over the Kerala coast.

After an eight-day belated start, simultaneously over Kerala and the north-east, the monsoon has been progressing well, covering the whole of the peninsular and the eastern regions, touching Uttar Pradesh on Tuesday. However, the delay in the onset has not been made up.

The monsoon current was not strong enough in the first week or so but picked up subsequently, bringing copious rainfall. The Bay of Bengal wing of the monsoon, which hits the north-east, remained dormant for some time getting stuck over Sikkim but has become active again.

The entire Gangetic West Bengal area has now been covered. The monsoons northern limit is currently touching the U P borders and hills.

Conditions are now deemed favourable for the monsoons onward march towards Delhi where it normally arrives on June 29. Though the IMD is still unable to predict the precise date of its arrival in Delhi and its adjoining states, it feels that there are good chances of pre-monsoon precipitation.

The setting in of easterly winds and rise in humidity can bring showers in the north-western region which, in any case, has been experiencing frequent brief rainy spells in the past few weeks.