kharif Archives - The India Climate Observatory

Dry tale of ten rain weeks

August 23, 2014 by Climate portal editor Leave a Comment

What a monsoon season is can no longer be judged by the over-simplified sums that assure the country about departures from an ‘average’ and the potential of ‘catching up’ as a season progresses. Since the 2009 drought, the awareness of farmers’ cooperatives and groups about the meteorological products and data available with the only provider of such measurements has grown. What has not grown is the willingness of government agencies on the one hand, and the consuming public on the other, to make similar investments in pursuing such clarity.

The area chart with its jagged stripes is the simplest indicator of the gap between the central government’s sanguine response to a very serious monsoon deficit, and the conditions that our districts have recorded since the first week of June 2014. The chart, based on the Indian Meteorological Department’s weekly district recordings of rainfall, plots 641 of these readings over ten weeks.

Our modified monsoon measure shows the overall trend, and made the case early for state and district level relief.

It is immediately clear that the green stripe (for ‘normal’) has at no point been significantly larger than any one of the other three important stripes, coloured deep red (for ‘scanty’), peach (for ‘deficient’) and blue (for ‘excess’).

In the seventh week of monsoon 2014 (17 to 23 July 2014) the number of districts that recorded normal rainfall for that week was 126, and that is the maximum number that have reported normal rainfall for a week. The next highest number of districts reporting normal for a week is 92, which was for the preceding week (10 to 16 July 2014).

More serious is the district-level reporting for the following three weeks – ending 30 July, 06 August and 13 August – which show the number of districts that reported normal rain for each week was less than 20% of the number of districts that reported deficient, scanty or excess rainfall. It was during this period that central government ministries and agencies did not publicly disclose the widespread monsoon deficiency and which did not act, by alerting the consuming public, to the short and medium term consequences of the monsoon crisis.

The modified monsoon measure (which has been advocated as a method to prime local administrations towards early recognition of the need for relief and remedial action in drought and drought-like conditions) displays to greater effect the glaring imbalance between ‘normals’ and their absence in the districts. In every one of the ten weeks, the light red bar (the ‘deficient 2’ measure, for rainfall of 21% less and lower) dominates.

Otherwise it is the dark blue bar (the ‘excess 2’ measure, for rainfall of 21% more and above) which is next most prominent. This is the clearest signal from a close reading of the district rainfall reportage that volatility in rainfall quantities is the feature most visible throughout monsoon 2014.

The IMD’s running table of the distict rainfall departures confirms this trend for monsoon 2014. In many of the 36 meteorological sub-divisions, weeks of scanty and deficient rainfall are broken by normal or excess rainfall, only to return to scanty and deficient. Taking the districts of Odisha and of western Madhya Pradesh as examples, this volatility can be seen at a glance, and is in concurrence with the overall trends that the modified monsoon measure has been indicating for the last two months.

The IMD’s shaky monsoon math

August 7, 2014 by Climate portal editor Leave a Comment

Over eight weeks of recorded monsoon rain, the district-level data available with the India Meteorological Department (IMD) portrays a picture that is very different from its ‘national’ and ‘regional’ advice about the strength and consistency of rainfall.

In its first weekly briefing on the monsoon of August 2014, IMD said: “For the country as a whole, cumulative rainfall during this year’s monsoon (01 June to 30 July 2014) has so far upto 30 July been 23% below the Long Period Average.” Out of 36 meteorological sub-divisions, said the IMD, the rainfall has been normal over 15 and deficient over 21 sub-divisions.

Readings for each district that has reported rainfall consistently for eight weeks. The columns represent the percentage value of actual rainfall for each district against their normal rainfall for eight weeks.

However, we have compiled a far more realistic reading of the monsoon season so far, from the IMD’s own data. For the 614 individual readings from districts that have regular rainfall readings, we have the following: 86 districts have registered scanty rainfall (-99% to -60%); 281 districts have registered deficient rainfall (-59% to -20%); 200 districts have registered normal rainfall (-19% to +19%); and 47 districts have registered excess rainfall (+20% and more).

Moreover, using our running weekly district-level monsoon meter – the details of which and the reasoning for which you will find in here – we see that there was a substantial dip in the number of districts registering ‘deficient 2’ rainfall, which is less than 21% of the normal and lower, during the seventh week of rain, that is the week of 17 to 23 July. But the general trend returned the following week, 24 to 30 July.

What this means, and the bar chart we have provided to illustrate the 614 individual values leaves us in no doubt, is that 367 out of 614 districts have had meagre rain for eight weeks. This also means that over eight weeks where there should have been rainfall that – as the IMD predicted in early June – would be around 95% of the ‘long period average’, instead three out of five districts have had less than 80% of their usual quota.

Our running weekly district-level monsoon meter to aid governance decisions shows the overall trend has not changed substantially in the last fortnight despite good rains during the seventh monsoon week.

Unfortunately, the press and media – in particular the business and financial media – persist in reporting ‘national’ deficits and whether monsoon 2014 will ‘make up’ the average in the remaining period. This approach must be corrected by the IMD’s departmental divisions as it incorrectly makes popular the notion that total rainfall over a designated number of weeks is the most important monsoon metric (See ‘Why there is no ‘normal’ in our monsoon’). Of course it is not so, as different crops follow their own crop calendars according to the agro-ecological regions they are grown in, and require optimum rain at certain times during their respective crop calendars.

The following examples show why such reporting can be misleading:

From Reuters: “August rains hold the key to India’s major summer crops such as rice, soybean, cane and cotton, after a wet end to July failed to make up fully for a dry start to the four-month monsoon season. A late revival shrank the shortfall in rain to around 10 percent below average in July, the India Meteorological Department’s update showed on Thursday, a sharp improvement from the 43 percent deficit in the first month of the season.”

From Bloomberg: “Monsoon crops are sown from June and harvested from October. The country had less than 40 percent of average rains in the first six weeks of the monsoon season that runs through September. The shortage shrank to 23 percent by end-July. Oilseed planting in India is poised to slump as much as 24 percent to the lowest since 2002 after a weak start to the monsoon.”

From The Hindu: “With the country receiving good rain in July, monsoon deficiency has gone down to 23 percent, the MET department on Friday said. While the monsoon deficiency at the national level in June was 43 per cent, by July end it has come down to 23 per cent. Central India, which saw little rain in June, has by now seen some good rain. It received 402.2 mm of rainfall as compared to expected rainfall of 477.7 mm with a deficiency of 16 per cent, much lesser compared to other parts of the country.”

From Business Standard: “According to the India Meteorological Department (IMD), the rains managed to recoup much of the June losses due to strong revival over the central and western regions, and parts of northern India. Weather officials said the momentum of July would continue till about August 10 and then slacken a bit.”

From Mint: “India’s July rain deficit narrowed to 10% of the long-term average for the month, marking a recovery from the driest June in five years, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said, as kharif crop sowing picked up in tandem. The shrinking of the rainfall deficit in July comes at a time when policymakers have been concerned about the impact of a below-average monsoon on foodgrain production and inflation. The June-September monsoon accounts for more than 70% of the annual rainfall in India and irrigates crops grown on half the country’s farmlands.”

Government readies drought plan

July 18, 2014 by Climate portal editor Leave a Comment

The drought management information system is in place and working.

The Ministry of Agriculture through the Department of Agriculture and Cooperation has released its national drought crisis management plan. This is not taken as the indicator that drought conditions are expected to set in, but to prepare for them where they are identified. In the fifth week of the South-West monsoon, the trend continues to be that week by week, the number of districts that have recorded less rainfall than they normally receive outnumber those districts with normal rainfall. When this happens over a prolonged period, such as four to six weeks, drought-like conditions set in and the administration prepares for these conditions. [Links to the documents are at the end of this posting.]

There are a group of ‘early warning indicators’ for the kharif crop (sowing June to August) which are looked for at this time of the year. They are: (1) delay in the onset of South-West monsoon, (2) long ‘break’ activity of the monsoon, (3) insufficient rains during June and July, (4) rise in the price of fodder, (5) absence of rising trend in the water levels of the major reservoirs, (6) drying up of sources of rural drinking water, (7) declining trend in the progress of sowing over successive weeks compared to corresponding figures for ‘normal years’.

On this list, points 1 and 2 are true, 3 is true for June and July until now, 4 and 5 are true, we have insufficient information for 6 and 7 but from mid-May there have been a number of media reports on water scarcity in the districts of peninsular, central and northern India. Thus the state of the ‘early warning’ indicators taken together have triggered the issuing of the government’s drought crisis management plan.

“The identified priorities of CMP are to clarify the goals and define the roles and responsibilities of various responders (ministries / departments, organisations and individuals) involved in crisis management, and putting together a communication process for quickly notifying the public in the event of a crisis,” the ministry has explained. “The plan outlined in this document does not replace the emergency procedures or contingency action plans already drawn by different agencies, but has been developed to address crisis situations that have the potential for a much greater impact on the nation.”

The reason we have plans at the national and state level, and contingency plans for each district in the event of drought, drought-like conditions, and water scarcity is the combination of several factors:

Every year more than 50 million people are directly exposed to drought and its effects, with 16% of India’s total area considered prone to drought.
In four out of every ten years rainfall in India is erratic.
Drought in varying degrees affects 68% of the sown area.
Regions with annual rainfall of 750-1,125 millimetres account for 35% of the land area and are drought prone.
Most of these zones lie in the arid (19.6%), semi-arid (37%) and sub-humid (21%) regions of India.
Up to three-quarters of the annual average rainfall occurs over 120 days of the year. A third of the total land area receives less than 750 mm of rainfall and is chronically drought prone.

In this ‘warning phase’ – which many districts have entered – the crisis management plan calls for short-term water conservation measures by municipal and district agencies, water-budgeting by the Ministry of Water Resources (Irrigation), the Ministry of Urban Development and by the Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation. Municipal and town councils are instructed to identify alternative sources of water when the town is in a ‘warning’ period and the supply of water may be restricted to 70 litres per person per day (about half of the normal 135). Water rationing and restricted use become urgent with municipal and town councils instructed to ensure that drinking water is not used for other purposes (like washing cars, watering gardens, and so on).

State governments have in place standing instructions of designating officers responsible for meeting the needs of rural and urban citizens during drought and drought-like conditions. This document contains the list of nodal officers of the line ministries and departments, and of the Ministry of Agriculture’s drought management division, with their contact details. The full crisis management plan of the Ministry of Agriculture, Department of Agriculture and Cooperation, is here.