The Hindu Business Line : Turnaround unlikely in monsoon this month

As per the latest information available from the India Meteorological Department (IMD), the total area-weighted rainfall for the country as a whole during July 1-21 amounted to 155.8 mm, which is 20.95 per cent below the historical long period average (LPA) of 197.1 mm for this period.

And neither is the IMD Director-General, Dr S.K. Srivastav, optimistic about the monsoon making a significant turnaround in the remaining days of this month. "We see a low pressure area forming in Orissa around July 25, but it will be a feeble low. Once the low crosses the coast, it may cause rains around Eastern and Central India, including in parts of Maharashtra and Vidarbha. But it is not strong enough to extend to other regions and will, therefore, dissipate," he told Business Line.

Dr Srivastav said the coming "weak revival" of monsoon activity would not shower rains in the currently parched North-Western belt, covering Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Rajasthan, West Uttar Pradesh, parts of West Madhya Pradesh and North Gujarat. In other words, the dry spell in this region would only worsen and "we can expect things to improve only in August."

The cumulative all-India average rainfall for the current South-West monsoon season from June 1 to July 21 stood at 315.4 mm, which is 12.32 per cent lower than the normal LPA of 359.7 mm for this period. Since June 23 — the week from when the real dry spell started — the country has received just 183.7 mm of rainfall, 26.81 per cent lower than the 251 mm that it would normally have got during this period.

To put it more clearly, during the period from June 1 to June 23, the country got about 21 per cent excess rainfall, whereas in the subsequent almost month-long phase till July 21, there has been a near 27 per cent deficiency. Just for the record, July 2002 witnessed a deficiency of 49 per cent, which made it the "worst-ever July in the history of recorded observations."

Dr Srivastav, however, maintained that the current dry spell is not as bad as the one two years ago. "Our analysis of the data shows that in 2002, we had rainfall much below normal from June 28 to August 2. This year, it has been more mixed. We had a lull from around June 20 to July 2, but from July 3 to July 20, there has been a recovery, with the actual precipitation tending towards the normal. But since then, there is a lull again, which will end in two days, though the revival would be weak."So far, 17 of the 36 meteorological sub-divisions have recorded deficient rains, which means actual precipitation being 20 per cent or more below the corresponding LPA. The deficient sub-divisions include Himachal (minus 40 per cent), Punjab (minus 40 per cent), Haryana & Delhi (minus 50 per cent), West Rajasthan (minus 54 per cent), East Rajasthan (minus 51 per cent), West Uttar Pradesh (minus 43 per cent), West Madhya Pradesh (minus 47 per cent), Gujarat region (minus 42 per cent), Saurashtra & Kutch (minus 43 per cent), Vidarbha (minus 37 per cent), Marathwada (minus 22 per cent), Telangana (minus 39 per cent), coastal Karnataka (minus 31 per cent), Kerala (minus 26 per cent) and Jharkhand (minus 27 per cent).

The only areas that have received good rains so far are coastal Andhra, Rayalaseema, Tamil Nadu, North and South Interior Karnataka, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, East Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and the entire North-East. It is a different matter though the some of the latter regions are grappling with an entirely different problem, that of floods due to excess rains.

According to the IMD, 54 per cent of the country's districts have recorded deficient to scanty rains so far this season, compared to only 28 per cent during the same period last year. In 2002, the figure was much worse, at 68 per cent.

Department `under-funded'

THE Director-General of IMD, Dr S.K. Srivastav, on Friday echoed the Minister for Science and Technology, Mr Kapil Sibal's view that the Department was vastly under-funded and required huge investments in network and computing capacity to make reliable and real-time forecasts.

"At present, my computing capacity is only at the level of mega-flops, which is not good enough to run General Circulation Models (GCM) necessary for making dynamic forecasts. For GCMs, I need 300 giga-flops on sustained speeds, which will convert into tera-flops. All this costs money," he said.

(A mega-flop equals one million floating-point operations per second, which is a basic measurement unit of performance of computers used for numerical work. One giga-flop equals 1,000 mega-flops and one tera-flop equals 1,000 mega-flops)

The IMD's Plan outlay for the current fiscal has been pegged at Rs 199.47 crore, which is way below the Rs 500 crore sought by Mr Sibal as a "one-time" investment.

Dr Srivastav also said the IMD does not have equipment for making real-time local area forecasts at the level of 25-50-km resolution. "We basically need good machines that can process vast amounts of data in real time and convert these into products for different uses, whether for agriculture or disaster-management purposes," he added.

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