La Nina to bring rains, and a colder winter

A monsoon-friendly La Nina condition has established rather quickly in the east equatorial Pacific Ocean in June itself, according to Japanese researchers.
Apart from the “above normal” rains for August and September, it may also ring in colder than normal conditions during the northern hemisphere winter.

Double bonanza
If the forecasts were to hold, the northern plains would stand to benefit from a double bonanza – assured soil moisture and cooler climes during the season.
These are ideal conditions for growing wheat and mustard, among others, during the ensuing rabi season.
A “fairly cold event” or La Nina (as against the warm El Nino) would roll out during the rest of the monsoon and beyond, says Dr Jing-Jia Luo, a researcher based in Tokyo.
Dr Jing-Jia is Senior Scientist with the Climate Variation Predictability and Applicability Research Programme at the Research Institute for Global Change (RIGC) under the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (Jamstec).
The La Nina may also last longer than usual, Dr Jing-Jia wrote to Business Line. He would not be surprised to see it active for more than one year from now.

Longer lasting
Its impact would be most visible in above-normal rains for India during the rest of the monsoon, and into the following autumn and winter.
Outside India, La Nina conditions are expected to lead to more rains/floods over north-eastern China while hot/dry conditions may emerge over Southeast China and southern Japan.
Above normal rains are also indicated for Indonesia, northern parts of South America, East Africa during the fall and winter seasons. Many parts of Australia also might experience surplus rains from October to early 2011.

Typhoon re-emerges

Meanwhile on Friday, tropical storm Consun in the South China Sea regained typhoon status and was barrelling towards Southwest China/Vietnamese coast for a landfall.
Once again, Consun has come in the way of any meaningful activity that might have been triggered in the Bay of Bengal, with a chunk of the monsoon flows straying off the beaten track to feed the typhoon.
Fortunately for India, forecast models indicate that Consun might make a landfall by Saturday itself and get weakened over the rugged terrain of interior Vietnam.

This would once again free up the monsoon flows from the dominating influence of the typhoon. However, forecasts did not indicate a ‘resourceful' low-pressure area taking shape in the Bay any time soon.
The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) sees the flows reviving over the Arabian Sea by Monday but largely benefiting peninsular India only.
A properly oriented ‘low' would have brought the monsoon trough southward, but India Meteorological Department (IMD) said in its forecast on Friday that the trough was expected to move north instead.
This would bring another round of rains into east and northeast India over the next few days, even as the west coast and parts of interior peninsula may continue to receive rains.
The IMD said in its update on Friday that it did not expect any possibility of ‘cyclogenesis' (birth of a weather system) in the Bay of Bengal for another five days.
Meanwhile, the all-India agro-met advisory issued by the IMD said that though the rainfall has been deficient in some districts of the country, it has been largely well-distributed over the last fortnight.
This has ultimately helped hasten the sowing of kharif crops in more and more areas. The revived monsoon in north India accelerated the sowing/transplanting of rice, oilseeds and cotton and rice sowing is at its peak.
Rainfall has softened the soil so that the already sown/transplanted crops, particularly in Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, find themselves in good condition. Most parts of soybean-growing Madhya Pradesh, too, received adequate rains as was the case with the cane-growing areas.
The area under groundnut crop has increased substantially in Anantapur district in the Rayalaseema subdivision of Andhra Pradesh.
The same was the case with red gram and castor also, as ‘sole crops' improved in the district thanks to good rains in the month of June and subsequently during July.