Southwest Monsoon Story So Far – As of 29th July

Reading Time: 3 minutes

With July coming to and end Southwest Monsoon completes the first half of the season and is an ideal time to take stock of the situation and find out how the season has evolved so far.   Our earlier June review of the Southwest Monsoon Story so far can be accessed here https://www.chennairains.com/archives/southwest-monsoon-2016-story-far-june-review/.

To start with we will look at how the season has evolved so far along with a brief comparison over June.  As one can see from the table Southwest Monsoon has certainly progressed well in July overall as we can see the districts that did not get enough rains in June was to an extent compensated in July.  This is indicated by the increase in number of districts that have either Normal or Excess status.  While only 54% of the districts were normal or better as of June end the same has now increased to 69% as of July 29th

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The progress can also be confirmed using the Progress chart of the districts comparing the status between June and July with only 88 districts showing a decline between June 30th & July 29th indicating the fairly well spread out rainfall during the month. It would be interesting to see the pattern among the declined districts to understand better on what went wrong in July.

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In an indication of how the interior places of Peninsular India has seen an excess rainfall year so far, the districts with highest positive anomaly is dominated by the interior districts of South India with 6 out of 10 from Karnataka.  This possibly shows why Bangalore city was seeing localized flooding & water logging this week after another day of intense rains.

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The west coast & Northeast districts as usual top the highest rainfall in the country during Southwest Monsoon.  The interesting factor is except for Udupi all the other districts have got higher than their average rainfall during the season.  After a poor monsoon last year the Konkan coast has come back to normal with super heavy rainfalls that are par for course happening this year.

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In an interesting development while the good rainfall districts have more or less got what they are expected the districts that are expected to receive poor rainfall has actually  managed to receive even lesser than their own standards with only Tiruppur in the list that is under normal status and all the other districts in the Top being worse off.