IMD confirms El Niño onset, warns of monsoon impact
The India Meteorological Department on Friday declared the onset of El Niño conditions over the equatorial Pacific Ocean. It also said these conditions are expected to strengthen further during the southwest monsoon season.
“The atmosphere has responded to the warming sea surface temperatures, and the coupled ocean-atmosphere system now exhibits characteristics consistent with El Niño conditions,” the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said.
The last time El Niño conditions developed was in 2023. Since 2000, these conditions have emerged in 2002, 2009 and 2015.
El Niño is one of the three phases of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a climate phenomenon characterised by changes in sea temperatures along the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, accompanied by fluctuations in the atmosphere overhead. While El Niño is known to have a warming effect over the planet, its opposite phase, called La Nina, usually results in a cooling effect. ENSO also has a neutral phase. El Niño leads to less rainfall in India, and its emergence could be one of the reasons why the country this year is expected to receive below-normal rainfall during the monsoon season, according to experts. On May 29, the IMD said rainfall this monsoon is likely to be about 90 per cent of the long-period average (LPA) with a model error of 4 per cent. LPA refers to the rainfall recorded over a particular region for a given interval, such as a month or season, averaged over a long period, typically 30 to 50 years.
The LPA of seasonal rainfall over India, based on data from 1971 to 2020, is 87 cm. If the monsoon season sees less than 90 per cent of the LPA rainfall, the IMD classifies it as ‘deficient’. India receives more than 70 per cent of its annual rainfall during the monsoon months, making the season critical for farming, drinking water supply, hydroelectric power generation and groundwater replenishment. This year, the arrival of monsoon got delayed, as its onset over Kerala occurred on June 4.” Typically, it takes place on June 1.
On Friday, the IMD said that conditions are favourable for the monsoon to advance into some more parts of the central Arabian Sea, Maharashtra, the remaining parts of Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and West Bengal over the next two to three days.
