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July rain crucial for paddy after lull-GS Mudur

-The Telegraph

Nearly three-fourths of India’s land area received poor rainfall during the first four weeks of the monsoon season, and an active monsoon phase is unlikely within the next week, weather scientists said today.

The poor rainfall has stirred concern among agro-meteorology scientists, tasked with translating weather information into advisories for farmers throughout the year, as the period for paddy transplantation draws closer.

“Rain during July is always crucial, but this year bountiful rain during the first fortnight of July will be even more important,” said Abhijit Saha, a senior scientist in the department of agricultural meteorology at the Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya in Nadia, Bengal.

Paddy farmers typically transplant seedlings from mid-July up to mid-August, he said.

“The seedlings themselves can be prepared in a relatively small patch of land, but we need a few days of good and widespread rainfall so that the soil has the right semi-solid features for seedling transplantation,” Saha told The Telegraph.

Although the monsoon this year has covered the southern peninsula, the east, and the west coast, its performance has been weak in most places. Vast tracts of central and northwest India still remain outside the monsoon zone.

Twenty-four of India’s 36 subdivisions have received either deficient (20 per cent to 59 per cent below normal) or scanty (more than 60 per cent below normal) rainfall since the monsoon season began on June 1. (See chart)

Rainfall over Gangetic Bengal has been 34 per cent below normal, while it is 36 per cent below normal in Bihar and 23 per cent below normal in Jharkhand, according to India Meteorological Department (IMD) data released today.

In its long-range forecast of the monsoon earlier this month, the IMD had predicted that India would receive normal rainfall, or 96 per cent of the average, during this season.

While scientists have so far been unable to pinpoint the factors that have contributed to the prolonged lull, they suspect that a series of storms in the northwest Pacific Ocean region have been drawing the monsoon winds east of India.

“We’ve had at least three major Pacific storms over the past month,” said Madhavan Rajeevan, a senior weather scientist and an adviser to the ministry of earth sciences. “This is not common during this season.”

He said sea surface temperatures in the Bay of Bengal had increased to a level where they could be considered ready for the genesis of an active monsoon phase, but the atmospheric conditions were not yet favourable for this to happen.

Scientists are also tracking sea surface temperatures in a region of the central Pacific that appear to be gradually rising and heading towards a threshold limit that scientists define as the El Nino phenomenon, known to sometimes disturb rainfall performance over India. “There’s no El Nino yet, but it appears to be evolving,” Rajeevan said.

Groundnut, soyabean, maize, pearl millet, pigeon pea and cotton are among crops other than paddy that depend on India’s summer rainfall.

“Without a quick revival of the monsoon activity within the next two weeks, rice and groundnut yields are likely to be affected — either through low yields or low acreage,” said Vyas Pandey, a scientist at the Anand Agricultural University in Gujarat.

The rainfall has been 67 per cent to 90 per cent below normal in the northwest granary states: Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh.

While senior IMD officials have indicated that paddy in these states is largely irrigated and less dependent on direct rainfall, agro-meteorology experts are worried that poor rainfall elsewhere will affect reservoir levels and thus indirectly hurt even irrigated zones.

“The Cauvery delta is Tamil Nadu’s granary and is largely irrigated,” said Vellingiri Geethalakshmi, a scientist at the Agro Climate Research Centre at the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore.

“But the availability of water depends on the levels in a reservoir, which in turn depends on rainfall in Karnataka and Kerala.”

IMD data show that rainfall has been 30 per cent below normal over Kerala and about 45 per cent below normal over interior Karnataka.

The long-range forecast, based on statistical correlations between monsoon rainfall and distant weather phenomena, is not designed to predict how the rain during the four-month season will be distributed over space and time.

Scientists have long pointed out that gaps in knowledge of cloud physics and monsoon mechanisms have stymied efforts to issue reliable forecasts beyond three days.

Computer simulations can generate seven-day forecasts, but simulations demand reliable models and a dense network of observational instruments to record temperature, pressure and other weather data to feed into the computer. India’s weather research community has been trying to develop better models and improve data collection.