Southwest Monsoon continues to stutter with large swathes of the country under dry conditions with only East India the only region to get meaningful rains thanks to the Low Pressure area persisting in the region. With August, the most critical month of the monsoon calendar, gone its time to do a check on how the monsoon has evolved so far.
As things stand Southwest Monsoon currently stands at -3.4% with July the only month to show positive anomaly against long term average. Monsoon started weak on account of lingering El Nino like conditions to pick up in July, unfortunately the most critical month of all, August put a spanner to the progress pretty much derailing the progress of Southwest Monsoon. Most of August saw poor support from tropical waves making it a weak month for most parts of the country with only the Central Indian region seeing decent rains. If one were to see how Southwest Monsoon evolved over the season using the daily rainfall chart its quite clear how August derailed the Monsoon groovy train
With almost 20 straight days of below normal rains in August it appears Southwest Monsoon was pretty much derailed off the track and has been struggling to get back on track. Going by model outlooks it appears we are going to see less widespread rains to make up for the lost days of rains. In particular East & NE India along with Southern Peninsular India in all probability is going to end up in negative zone with too much to cover in the slog overs of monsoon.
The weekly district rainfall chart also indicates the progressive decline of monsoon as we moved into August with 4 of the weeks seeing more than half of the country recording deficit rains. In particular the week ending 24th August was the low point of this year so far with more than 70% of the country recording deficit rainfall.
Can Southwest Monsoon recover enough to end the year in positive zone as IMD & SkyMet expected in their initial long range forecast? Looks less likely with possibly -3% to -5% looking more likely as the season ending deficit as things stand.