Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
India’s monsoon is the most dependable thing in the country’s calendar. Every June it sweeps up from the south, drenches the fields, fills the rivers and lifts the cruelty of summer. This year, it turned up on time, then promptly lost its nerve.
By June 20, the country had collected only 45.6mm of rain, against a normal of 84.4mm for this stage of the season. That is a deficit of 46 per cent, according to the India Meteorological Department (IMD).
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The word normal here means the Long Period Average, the rainfall India usually receives over many decades, the yardstick against which every wet or dry spell is measured.
A 46 per cent shortfall this early is not a small wobble. It is a season starting on the back foot.
WHY THE RAIN HAS GONE MISSING
The chief suspect sits 10,000 kilometres away, in the Pacific Ocean. The IMD confirms that El Nino conditions are present and are expected to strengthen through the monsoon.
El Nino is an unusual warming of the surface waters of the central and eastern Pacific. When that distant ocean heats up, it nudges the world’s wind patterns out of place and, time and again, weakens the rains over India.
The other ocean that matters is closer to home. The Indian Ocean Dipole, the see-saw of warm and cool water between the western and eastern Indian Ocean, is currently neutral, neither helping nor hurting.
A friendlier, positive phase would have softened El Nino’s blow. It has not arrived.
Then there is the Madden-Julian Oscillation, or MJO, a vast pulse of cloud and rain that travels eastward around the equator every 30 to 60 days. Depending on where it sits, it can flood India with showers or starve it of them. For now, it offers little help.
The result is a tired wind machine. The cross-equatorial flow, the river of moist air that should be racing from the Southern Hemisphere into India, is running weaker than normal. Central India has been left driest of all.
WHEN THE TAPS MIGHT OPEN AGAIN
There is reason not to despair. The IMD expects conditions to turn favourable in the final week of June, when the Somali Jet, a powerful low-level wind that hauls moisture off the Arabian Sea, is forecast to strengthen.
As it does, the monsoon should push into Maharashtra, Odisha, Jharkhand and Bihar.
Until then, much of India must wait, and sweat. Heatwave conditions are still scorching Bihar and East Uttar Pradesh even as the clouds gather elsewhere.
The monsoon, in the end, is rarely punctual to the day. It has stumbled before and recovered. The coming fortnight will reveal whether this faithful visitor is merely late, or genuinely out of sorts.
– Ends
SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
