ENVIRONMENT: Relief Sets in as Monsoon Keeps Date with India

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jun 27 2003 (IPS) - Defying dire predictions of a wayward monsoon made by the meteorological department, India’s life-giving annual rainy season seems well on track, bringing cheer to farmers and traders alike.

”We are saved,” Manguram Hooda said as he gazed up at darkening skies over the farming state of Haryana, which borders the national capital region of north-west India. Haryana falls in a pocket of the vast subcontinent that is last to greet the advancing monsoons.

Pre-monsoon showers have already begun flooding the streets of Delhi, but there are few complaints as people welcome the respite from the punishing heat. ”Business picks up when the rains are on time – there is more money in the markets,” said Akhilesh Chawla, who deals in consumer goods in the busy Lajpat Nagar area of the capital.

Such optimism was missing barely a month ago, when R R Kelkar, chief of the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD), predicted a second drought year in succession because of a ”massive variation in distribution”.

The word ‘monsoon’ is derived form the Arabic word ‘mausam’, which essentially means season. But it is now used to describe seasonal changes in wind direction caused by temperature differences between the land and sea that occur in many parts of the world, but primarily over the Indian subcontinent.

Predicting the course of the monsoons has been the task of the IMD since 1886. Its pronouncements are considered to be so sensitive they have to be first conveyed to the top levels of the government, because the information could adversely impact the country’s economy that is still based largely on rain-fed farming.

Kelkar’s warning of these ‘adverse’ conditions quickly scotched speculations that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee could call early general elections this year before the completion of its full five-year-term in 2004.

At a BJP party conclave held a week ago, the leadership announced that the general elections ”would not be advanced by a single day and would be held as scheduled in 2004”.

But as the monsoons swept across the country this week, Kelkar was able to revise his weather predictions. ”There is now an 80 percent chance that 2003 will not be a drought year,” he said.

The forecasting of monsoons has not been always included distinguishing between drought and no-drought situations, but this year the IMD has a computerised model that is tuned to predicting more accurately the probability of drought.

After this year’s round of confused predictions, there have been calls on the IMD to make its forecasting more dependable and perhaps even make use of data released by other agencies around the world.

But Kelkar said, ”We cannot trust predictions made by foreign weather agencies because they are not India-specific.”

Still, there are other agencies in India that have been issuing long-range forecasts of monsoon behaviour over the last eight years with a fair amount of accuracy. One of them is the Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulations (C-MMACS), situated in the southern city of Bangalore.

According to the centre, rainfall in south India this year is expected to be above normal in June and below normal in July. Rainfall in northern India will be below normal in June and above normal in July, it said.

Overall, C-MMACS has forecast an 85 percent chance of normal rainfall this year compared to the IMD’s more optimistic 96 percent. But the institute hastened to add that its predictions were ”experimental” and meant to evaluate its ”neural network-based technique” of forecasting and were not to be used for any other purpose.

Another challenge to the IMD’s monopoly on monsoon predictions comes form neighbouring Bangladesh, where researchers from the United States recently announced a new technique capable of making 20 to 25-day forecasts of rainfall that could greatly help farmers on the subcontinent.

Last year, the technique developed by the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences was shown to mirror actual precipitation in a one-million square kilometre swathe of the Ganges valley in Bangladesh.

Prof. Peter Webster, who led the U.S. State Department-funded research, claimed in February that the new technique could guide farmers in choosing optimal planting times and making other decisions such as better water management.

”We could have predicted the month-long break in the monsoon rains that lasted from the end of June to early July and which caused a 6 billion dollar loss in crops in the Ganges Valley. If farmers had this forecast last summer, they could have changed agricultural practices, such as delaying the planting,” Webster claimed before the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Like the IMD forecasts, Webster’ technique is also statistical. Likewise, it considers factors in detailed knowledge of the dynamics of the atmosphere and the ocean, which produce monsoon variability on monthly time scales.

Webster said his forecasting method is applicable to the rainy season of any monsoon region and adjusts for precipitation changes related to temporary climatic events such as El Nino and La Nina. Last year was an El Nino year, and, as expected, it resulted in decreased rainfall on the Indian subcontinent.

Kelkar said all statistical methods had inherent shortcomings and would ultimately have to be replaced by more precise ‘dynamic’ models based on relatively stable factors. ”India is working on its own dynamic model which should be available in a few years,” he said.

For now though, India’s farmers – who form a third of its billion plus population – are just glad that they have been spared a disastrous two drought years in succession.