Monsoon fails Southern coastal States yet again

Proximity to the sea is not enough to guarantee coastal regions in the South adequate rainfall as is brought out by the performance of the monsoons in the last two years.

Kerala, Coastal Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, and to some extent coastal Andhra Pradesh, have witnessed this trend during the last two years.

On Monday, the India Met Department (IMD) declared that the North-East monsoon for the year 2017 has come to an end.

Just two Met subdivisions — North Interior Karnataka (+7 per cent) and Rayalaseema (+19 per cent) — emerged top gainers.

Interestingly, these two were also among the worst sufferers of a disastrous season the year before with massive rain deficits respectively of -77 per cent and -66 per cent.

But the preceding South-West monsoon too had turned out to be good with North Interior Karnataka receiving +3 per cent rainfall and Rayalaseema doing one better at +27 per cent.

The two monsoons have, by turns, sought to balance the record for individual Met subdivisions except in the case of Coastal Karnataka, and to a lesser extent to Kerala and Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, in that order.

Coastal Karnataka has literally drawn a blank during the South-West and North-East monsoon with deficits of -21 per cent, -63 per cent, -16 per cent, and -18 per cent consecutively during the last two years.

As for Kerala, these figures were -34 per cent and -62 per cent during 2016 though somewhat better at -9 per cent and -7 per cent during 2017.

Rainfall between +19 per cent and -19 per cent of the long-period average is considered ‘normal’ in the IMD parlance.

In the case of Tamil Nadu, the 2017 South-West monsoon delivered a spectacular +31 per cent surplus.

But it had come on the back of a big -62 per cent deficit during the 2016 North-East monsoon and -20 per cent during the preceding South-West monsoon.

Coastal Andhra Pradesh saw deficit North-East monsoons in 2016 and 2017 but gave a good account of itself during the respective South-West monsoons with +15 per cent and +14 per cent.

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