Too Early To Gauge El Nino Effect On Monsoon: Met Dept This Year

Hectic parleys are on between the officials of the Indian Meteorological department and the agriculture ministry to gauge the effect of the El Nino warm water currents which experts feel could threaten the monsoon rains thereby affecting foodgrain production in the country.

The Meteorological department said it would not be proper to say anything at this moment although there is no positive indication currently available to suggest it will have a disastrous effect on the monsoons in the country.

They said the government would have a fair picture of this problem only by the end of this month as El Ninos parametres needed to be carefully monitored to study its impact on the south-west monsoons which arrived late in the country.

 

They also refused to draw a parallel between the delayed south-western monsoon and the El Nino. The attention of the government to the impact of the El Nino was drawn after international reports stated that the dreaded warm water currents which have developed in the southern Pacific threaten to render the monsoon weak and erratic in the country.

The Meteorological officials stated that though the El Nino effect is only one of the 16 parameters in the meteorological model, it nevertheless is given high weightage while estimating rainfall and other climatic affects.

An official in the agriculture ministry explained that even if this years monsoon or the food grain output remain largely unaffected by the El Nino effect we still will have to study the crop and moisture conditions in the next year. Reports quoted a German journal that stated that the El Nino raises the temperature of water off the coast of South America and can disrupt normal weather patterns worldwide including India.

The El Nino usually causes strong winds to blow in a westerly direction from the Pacific to the Atlantic, disrupting the development of hurricanes and leading to erratic rainfall. The Indian Meteorological department has predicted the tenth normal monsoon during the current year after determining nine of the 16 factors used for calculating climatic and other conditions in the country.

According to the Hamburg-based oil world the development of an El Nino warm water current in the southern Pacific has increased the chance of drought across South-east Asia, Australia and India by threatening oilseeds and grain crops in these areas.