Monsoon’s new normal shows diminishing rainfall in the last seven decades

IMD has predicted that India will experience normal monsoon this year. However, the new normal now is 12 mm lower than the old normal.

The India Meteorological Department predicted that India will experience a normal monsoon this year. However, the new normal now is 12 mm lower than the old normal.

The new all-India rainfall, based on data from 1971 to 2020 for the southwest monsoon, is 868.8 mm. This will replace the previous normal of 880.6 mm that was based on data from 1961 to 2010.

“The above decrease is part of natural multidecadal epochal variability of dry and wet epochs of all India rainfall,” IMD said. Average rainfall in India mostly followed a downward trend since 1950, before recently improving in the last decade.

The average rainfall in the decade ending-1950 was 1107 mm, which fell to 1070 mm in 1970, 1062 mm in 1990, and 1034 mm in 2010. However, it improved and rose to 1095 mm in 2020. The years 2019 and 2021 remained outliers with a significantly high annual rainfall of nearly 1240 mm.

According to the World Bank’s Climate Change Knowledge Portal, Bihar, Meghalaya, Nagaland, West Bengal, and Uttar Pradesh, showed significant decreasing trends in southwest monsoon rainfall from 1989 to 2018. Arunachal Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh also showed significant decreasing trends, while other states did not show any significant changes in southwest monsoon rainfall during the same period.

The IMD, in its latest forecast, once again underlined that the northeastern part of the country was likely to receive below-normal rainfall. Even last year, all the northeastern states, except Sikkim, received below-normal rain, with Manipur experiencing less than half of the normal rainfall.

Meanwhile, at a time when food inflation is a global concern, the monsoons could be a determining factor for food prices in the upcoming months. Farmers in India heavily depend on the monsoons for food production.