'60% chance of drought this year'

According to Jatin Singh, managing director of Skymet, IMD may have some limitations in presenting its first forecast as ‘below normal’

- Puja Das

Skymet forecasted a 94% long-period average monsoon forecast, considered below-normal rainfall, while IMD expects monsoon to be normal at 96% of LPA this year. What is your take on this?

Ninety-six percent LPA is the lowest range forecast in the normal rainfall category. If you look at drought probabilities, IMD predicts it to be 51%, while Skymet anticipates a 60% probability of a drought-like situation this year.

Both IMD and Skymet talked about El Nino and Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), and as per our predictions, El Nino is seen to be dominant. In the two decades of my career, the monsoon was good in 1997 and 2019 despite El Nino.

Skymet’s weather forecast is seen to be wrong twice, once in 2015 and the other in 2019. What causes such errors?

There is always a probability for forecasts to be wrong. Predictions not only by Skymet but also by IMD have been wrong before. There might be an error. I have been forecasting for 11 years, and I have got two wrong. There is always some probability of IOD superseding everything else, but that probability is low.

We are not able to model IOD accurately. It is extremely erratic. The spoiler in the monsoon forecast is the IOD. If the IOD becomes too strong, the monsoon will be normal, which happened in 2019, despite the El Nino phenomenon. It happened in 2021 and 2022, which were La Nina years. Negative IOD weakened the monsoon, and then it started becoming neutral. The Indian Ocean is warm enough that it does not matter if it ends or weakens. In 2012, the monsoon was about 92% of LPA, and 2015 was a drought year. In both years, we had the IOD positive, but the positive IOD did not have a significant impact. In 1997 and 2019, EL Nino was strong, but the strong IOD could weaken the impact of El Nino. That happens, but not often.