The Hindu Business Line : Monsoon to bless north-west this time

Thiruvananthapuram, Jan. 25 Northwest India is forecast to receive good precipitation during this year’s southwest monsoon unlike during the last when it had ended up with a deficit.

A negative Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) event coinciding with the impending monsoon will allow for the natural progression of the rain belt into the northwest, says Prof. Toshio Yamagata, Programme Director at the Frontier Research Centre for Global Change (FRCGC) under the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (Jamstec), and Dr Swadhin Behera, Sub-Leader at the Climate Variations Research Programme at FRCGC.

The IOD event is the result of a seesawing of sea-surface temperatures in the western Indian Ocean and the seas surrounding the Indonesia archipelago. A positive IOD event is represented in an anomalous warming of the western Indian Ocean, which causes the summer monsoon to be largely biased to central India and the west coast.

This was what happened during the monsoon last year when central India, the peninsula and the west coast received excess rainfall to the detriment of the north-west. This has had cascading impact on seasonal Rabi crop sowing in the region and expected output. Rains had dried up from August 2007 and the situation did not change until the first week of January this year.

The FRCGC is the latest to join other international weather models to forecast normal to excess precipitation for the north-west during the 2008 monsoon. The others are the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) and the International Research Institute (IRI) for Climate Prediction and Society at the University of Columbia.