A man drives an electric rickshaw in the midst of monsoon rain, in New Delhi, Friday, August 29, 2025. | Photocredit: PTI
The monsoon was a revelation this year, not only in the way it has delivered so far, but also in the way it has proven the India Meteorological Department (IMD) of India, which went against the grain to bet in an excess season.
IMD supports itself
The IMD supported itself with what DS Pai, a top meteorologist at the IMD who led the climate research and services at Pune, described as a bold call. This was a surplus year followed in 2024 when the country received 108 percent of its long periods of average (LPA), the highest since 2020. Year 2024 was preceded in a year under the Moon in 2023 that had ended with only 95 percent of the LPA.
Dr. Pai told line The challenge this year more or less reflected that from 2010, when the monsoon had returned to the normal rainfall of 102 percent immediately after an El Niño year 2009 that left a shortage of 23 percent, one of the worst ever. Just like this year, the monsoon had arrived early, but stopped in June in 2009.
Clouds about June Blues
The actual rainfall in 1-15 June this year was 31 percent lower than normal, with all with subdivisions registering shortcomings. However, the monsoon revived from 15-16 June, before the month ended with 8 percent surplus. There had been no La Niña for everyone back in the Equatorial Pacific, but neither of the monsoon killer El Niño. The next neutral condition was more a rain enabler, if not exactly a booster.
The early setback in June this year had almost ensured that some people would call the IMD’s Bluff because they accepted a surplus call early in the season. But it supported his instincts and was terrain, which has since become more than good. Pai repeated more or less sentiments in Tokyo -based researcher Dr. Swadhin Beua while analyzing this year’s rainfall trends.
Extensive monsoon?
Trends in recent years, with a few blips in between, indicate that the monsoon runs through an epochal phase from normal to above normal rainfall. Pai does not exclude the prospects of an extensive monsoon after September this year, because according to him the season will proceed until December. The only difference is to make winds shift from southwestern (June to September) to northeast (October to December), although the final phase has largely influence on the South Peninsula.
He would not be surprised to see if the southwestern flows are almost merging into northeast by 15 October by the last season, also known as ‘monsoon in reverse’, arrives. Pai remembered how the IMD recently calibrated the date of the withdrawal of monsoon from northwest India from 1 September to 17 September.
Trends in northeastern India
The contrast between a shortage in Northeast India with a surplus northwest can best be explained by the march of a series of rain-bearing low pressure areas, or even the strange depression (as in a rare deep depression currently about Gujarat-Rrajasthan).
During an upper normal season they give birth to the bay of Bengal and move over Central India, North-West India and West India to the disadvantage of Northeast India. This region is usually owed during a ‘break -tuesson’ phase when the nuclear monsoon Trog moves to the north from Central -India. There are few such ‘breaks’ in between in above normal or surplus monsoon years.
Fluid -footprint
Pai endorsed the position that irrigation practices followed in northwest India during outside season, leaves moisture behind to hang over the region due to evapotranspiration from country to atmosphere. When this combines with moisture packed by winds from both the bay of Bengal and the Arab Sea that is activated by low pressure systems, it can only mean above normal to flood rains. Incoming Western disturbances interact with these systems that fall even further in the rain, as witness this season.
Published on September 9, 2025
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