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This year monsoon will be normal albeit with a slightly reduced benchmark.

Indian Meteorological Department, better known as by their acronym ‘IMD’,  on Thursday the 14th of April 2022 made their prediction public stating a “normal” rainfall between July to September.

It will be between 96 per cent to 104 per cent, the IMD prediction said. And the document is known as Long Range Forecast (LRF) for 2022.

However IMD also reduced the benchmark to define normal Southwest monsoon rainfall to 868.6 mm from the previous 880.6 mm on the basis of availability of fresh data from its network of rain gauges across India.

The press statement said  – the “Southwest Monsoon Seasonal (July to September) Rainfall over the country as a whole is most likely to be normal which is 96 to 104 per cent of the Long Period Average (LPA).

Quantitatively, the monsoon seasonal rainfall is likely to be 99 per cent of the LPA with a model error of +-5 per cent. The LPA of seasonal rainfall over the country as a whole for the period 1971-2020 is 87 cm. “

“La Nina conditions are prevailing over the equatorial Pacific region.

The latest Monsoon Mission Climate Forecast System (MMCFS) as well as other climate model forecasts, indicates that La Nina conditions are likely to continue during the Monsoon season,”.

The weather office on Thursday reduced the benchmark to define normal Southwest monsoon rainfall to 868.6 mm from the previous 880.6 mm on the basis of availability of fresh data from its network of rain guages across the country.

The new all-India rainfall normal has been calculated on the basis of rainfall data over a 50-year period from 1971-2020 and will be used as the benchmark to measure rainfall in the country.

IMD Director General Mrutyunjay Mohapatra said the definition of the LPA has to be updated after every decade, as per the international practice.

“We take into consideration various aspects. One of them is the climate variability that changes over the period of time. Second, the number of rain gauge stations increases over the period of time giving us more data that is uniformly distributed. So, it (forecast) becomes more realistic and also caters to requirements of smaller regions and specific locations,” he said.

The previous update had taken place in 2019, after a delay of seven years as gathering of data and analysing it took time, he said.

IMD says the new rainfall normal has been computed using rainfall data from 4,132 rain gauge stations well distributed over the country representing 703 districts of India.