India Monsoon Rain Outlook by the IMD

Apr 21, 2011; 12:24 PM ET

FORECAST FOR NEAR-NORMAL RAINFALL

The India Meteorology Department (IMD) have released their preliminary outlook for the nation’s rainfall for the season of the South West Monsoon. The verdict: near-normal rainfall.

Specifically, the IMD forecast that India will have 98 percent of its normal (long-period average) rainfall, with an error margin of 5 percent (+ or -).

The forecast applies to the months of June, July, August and September, the four months during which the weather is dominated by the South West Monsoon.

According to the IMD, the SW Monsoon delivers about 80 percent of India’s yearly rainfall. They give the figure of 89 cm (35 inches) as normal seasonal rainfall averaged across the whole of India.

Only the states of Jammu and Kashmir, and Tamil Nadu, do not have more than half of their rainfall during the SW Monsoon.

The SW Monsoon is instrumental to rainfall, not only elsewhere in the Subcontinent (Bangladesh, Nepal, northern and eastern Pakistan), but across a wide swathe of South and East Asia.

India, alone, has something like 1,200 million souls mostly dependent upon rainwater shed during the four key summer months. There are hundreds of millions elsewhere in Asia sharing the same state of dependency.

The IMD will release an updated, more detailed forecast in June.