NEW DELHI: India’s farm-dependent economy has made it through the crucial monsoon season despite poor rains in key growing areas by relying on short-term sophisticated rain forecasts, a weather official said.
Rainfall in the subcontinent’s annual southwest monsoon was 97 per cent of the long-term average near the end of the June-September season, qualifying it as ‘normal’, said S. C. Bhan, a senior forecaster at the Indian Meteorological office.
But Bhan said farmers in India’s bread-basket northwestern states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, which had deficient rainfall this season, did well with the aid of seven-day forecasts issued by a supercomputer.
“The crops like rice did well because farmers in the northwest have access to irrigation and our medium-term forecasts helped greatly in planting decisions,” Bhan said.
India also does long-term forecasts based on historical data, but those have proved far less reliable than the medium-term outlook done by the supercomputer studying variables such as temperature, wind and cloud cover in a complex model, Bhan said.
“In the long-term forecasts, anything can go wrong and agencies all over the world have trouble predicting long-term weather prospects,” Bhan said. “But for the medium term, we are fairly accurate and that helps farmers save money on how much water to use in irrigation.”
Reliable short-term predictions are crucial for India’s economy with farming accounting for a quarter of gross domestic product and affecting the lives of the majority of the country’s one-billion-plus people.
“We have 21 offices across the country that meet with farm extension agents twice a week to give updated forecasts,” Bhan said. “Then we work with the agriculture ministry and state governments in addition to our website and providing information through newspapers, television and radio.”
Still, the monsoon threw up surprises.
In India’s normally wet northeast, monsoon rains were well below normal which allowed Bhaben Das and his family to stay put in a tiny hut on the banks of the Brahmaputra River for the first time in a decade.
“I do not remember having stayed at home during the monsoon season. We always take shelter in mud embankments or remain in wooden boats or bamboo rafts to escape the floods,” Das, a 45-year-old farmer, said.
In the centre and south of the country, which has been hit by severe drought in the past few years, the monsoon rains were above forecasts. This led the farm ministry to forecast that the kharif, or winter food crop, would rise almost two per cent over last year to 105.25 million tonnes.
Bhan said farmers in Andhra Pradesh, one of the southern states worst hit by drought where hundreds of indebted farmers have committed suicide in the past few years, relied on the medium-term forecasts this year.
“It definitely helped,” Bhan said. “Farmers relied on the forecasts in making decisions on planting, fertilizer use and how much diesel to buy to run pumps which can add greatly to expenses.”
However, the medium-term forecast failed to help the financial capital of Mumbai in late July, when torrential rains blanketed the city and surrounding Maharashtra state leaving more than 1,000 dead in floods.
“The floods in Mumbai came from abnormally high rains in a short period,” Bhan said. “We don’t have the model to forecast such disasters yet.”
With the monsoon end, forecasters will now turn their attention to cyclones that form in the Bay of Bengal in the autumn.
