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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Weathering forecasts
-The Hindu Business Line


The IMD should be conferred autonomous status so that it functions along professional lines, without worrying about political correctness.

Given how awry its forecasts in the last couple of years had gone, one can be forgiven for being cynical about the India Meteorological Department's (IMD) prognosis of a ‘normal' South-West monsoon this time. The country's official weather agency has predicted nationwide rainfall during the four-month monsoon season ending September to be 98 per cent of the historical long period average, making it ‘normal' in an aggregate sense. In 2011 and 2012, too, it had issued similar relatively optimistic first-stage forecasts, only to revise them downwards later, almost in sync with the rather weak rainfall activity seen during June-July. But even as the IMD's outlook turned progressively gloomier, the monsoon's actual performance registered progressive improvement. Both these years ended up with ‘normal' monsoons, though not quite in the order indicated by the IMD. The latter could neither anticipate the monsoon's very poor initial advance nor its spectacular latter-half recovery.

The latest 98 per cent normal monsoon forecast for the country as a whole has limited practical utility, as it doesn't provide any insights into how the projected rainfall would be distributed over the four-month period across different regions. Farmers, for instance, are interested more in how much it will rain in their respective areas during June and July, which are the peak sowing months. The IMD may seek to take refuge in the fact that predicting dynamic ocean-land-atmosphere interaction systems - which is what the monsoon is all about - isn't an easy task. But that still cannot be enough reason for the IMD not to provide some idea of the monsoon's temporal and spatial distribution. Only ten days back, the World Meteorological Organisation's South Asian Climate Outlook Forum projected a below-normal monsoon for South Interior Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. The APEC Climate Centre in Korea, likewise, expects good rains for India in June, but deficient in July. If these agencies can come out with such specific (and more useful) forecasts, what stops the IMD from following suit?

One argument that might be offered here is that the IMD, unlike the various global agencies, cannot afford to give ‘alarmist' predictions of the Indian monsoon. But that misses the point: The job of a weather agency, official or otherwise, is to give the ‘right' forecast using the best available scientific and computational resources. A bad, albeit politically convenient, forecast can do far greater damage than one that, even if less pleasant, allows for timely adjustments by economic agents. Had farmers known about bad rains last June-July - which most agencies, barring IMD, had predicted - they would probably have deferred plantings, while enabling even fertiliser or seed firms to plan dispatches accordingly. But, instead, everyone was caught on the wrong-foot, leading to a renewed burst of food inflation. The IMD needs to be insulated from political pressures and equipped to do what is expected from a professional weather agency.