Pull up a satellite k of July is supposed to be the loudest part of the monsoon. The Arabian Sea should be smothered under a shield of white cloud. The Bay of Bengal should be churning out storm after storm. The Western Ghats should be invisible under a permanent curtain of rain.
Instead, the frame looks strangely bare. The seas are largely clear. Central India sits under open skies. The picture resembles mid-April, when the country is still waiting for the rains, not mid-July, when it should be drenched in them.
This is not a satellite glitch. It is a well-known, if unwelcome, mood swing of the Indian monsoon. Meteorologists call it a break.
On July 10, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said in a press release that subdued rainfall activity is likely over central and south peninsular India during the next six to seven days.
In plain words, the heart of the monsoon has gone quiet, and it is not expected to wake up before roughly July 17.
The timing makes this pause sting. It has arrived after one of the driest Junes in more than a century, and after barely a week of good rain in early July.
WHAT THE SATELLITE IS ACTUALLY SHOWING
Weather satellites such as Isro’s INSAT-3DR and INSAT-3DS watch the country round the clock. They photograph clouds in visible light, the way our eyes see them, and in infrared, which measures how cold the cloud tops are.
Cold cloud tops matter because they reveal deep convection. Convection is simply warm, moist air rising. When it rises fast and high, it builds towering cumulonimbus clouds, the tall thunderheads that produce heavy rain. The higher a cloud grows, the colder its top, and the brighter it glows on an infrared image.
In the first week of July, those images were dramatic. Two enormous cloud systems dominated the frame. One sat over the east central Arabian Sea, feeding the Konkan coast and the Western Ghats. The other churned over the northern Bay of Bengal, soaking eastern India.
By this week, both engines had switched off. Organised cloud has thinned out over both seas and over the Indian landmass. What remains are scattered, shallow clouds, the kind that decorate the sky rather than water the fields. That is why the imagery looks like April. April skies and broken monsoon skies share the same signature, which is an absence of deep convection.
THE MONSOON HAS NOT FAILED, IT HAS SHIFTED
The single most important reason for this lull is the behaviour of the monsoon trough. The monsoon trough is an elongated belt of low air pressure that normally stretches across the plains, from northwest India to the head of the Bay of Bengal. Low pressure pulls air inwards.
Think of the trough as a long trench that vacuums in moist winds from both the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, forces that air to rise, and squeezes rain out of it over central India.
When the trough sits in its normal position, roughly across the middle of the country, the core monsoon zone gets widespread rain. But the trough does not stay put. Every monsoon season, it occasionally drifts north and parks itself along the foothills of the Himalayas.
That is what has happened now. The IMD’s extended range forecast for July 9 to 22 indicates that the western end of the trough is running near or north of its normal position during the first week.
The consequences flip the country’s rain map. The foothills, the northeast, Bihar and east Uttar Pradesh catch the moisture and get
The IMD’s July 11 release warned of isolated heavy to very heavy rainfall over northeast India, sub-Himalayan West Bengal and Sikkim, Bihar and east Uttar Pradesh.
Meanwhile, the regions the trough abandoned, which is most of central and peninsular India, fall under sinking air. Meteorologists call this subsidence. Sinking air warms and dries as it descends, which dissolves clouds instead of building them.
Subsidence acts like a lid on the atmosphere. Moisture may still be present near the ground, which is why the weather feels muggy, but nothing can rise high enough to become rain.
THE MISSING RAINMAKERS OF THE BAY
Central India has a second problem. Its most reliable rain does not come directly from the sky above it. It is delivered.
Through a normal July, the Bay of Bengal repeatedly spins up low pressure areas and depressions. A low pressure area is a large rotating mass of air with lower pressure at its centre, and a depression is its stronger, better organised sibling.
These systems form over the warm waters of the Bay, then travel west and northwest across Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and beyond, dragging enormous quantities of moisture inland and raining it out along the way.
The early July surge was powered by exactly such a system. A depression formed over the northwest Bay of Bengal on July 5 and marched inland across Odisha, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh, triggering heavy to extremely heavy rain along its path. It was that single traveller, along with an active offshore trough hugging the west coast, that briefly turned the monsoon ferocious.
Right now, no fresh system is following it. With the Bay quiet, the interior’s rain supply line has been cut.
The Arabian Sea branch has weakened too. The low level jet, the ribbon of strong southwesterly winds that races across the Arabian Sea and slams into the Western Ghats, has slackened.
Those mountains make rain through orographic lifting, which means the hills physically force moist air upwards until it cools and condenses. Weaker winds mean weaker lifting, and the country’s most dependable rain factory has gone slow.
THE PLANET-SCALE CULPRITS: EL NINO AND THE MJO
Behind these regional shifts stand two global players.
The first is El Nino, an abnormal warming of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. The tropical atmosphere behaves like a connected circuit, and when the Pacific warms, rising air concentrates over those distant waters. Somewhere else, air must sink to balance it, and that somewhere often includes the Indian subcontinent.
According to the IMD, weak El Nino conditions are prevailing and are likely to continue through the monsoon season. El Nino is one of the main reasons June ended with a deficit of about 40 per cent, making it among the driest Junes since records began in 1901.
The second is the Madden-Julian Oscillation, or MJO. The MJO is a giant pulse of cloud and rain that circles the equator every 30 to 60 days, enhancing rainfall wherever it currently sits and suppressing it elsewhere. Scientists track its position in eight numbered phases.
The IMD notes the MJO is currently in phase 8, a position associated with suppressed rainfall over the Indian region. The planet’s travelling rain generator is, quite literally, on the wrong side of the world.
India’s usual insurance policy is missing as well. A positive Indian Ocean Dipole, a pattern in which the western Indian Ocean runs warmer than the east, can pump extra moisture towards India and blunt El Nino’s damage. This year, the IMD says the Dipole is neutral. There is no local shield.
WHEN WILL THE RAIN COME BACK?
There is genuine good news in the forecast, and it sits in the second half of July.
The IMD’s extended range outlook for July 16 to 22 expects the western end of the monsoon trough to return close to its normal position for many days. More importantly, a cyclonic circulation is likely to take shape over the northwest Bay of Bengal, and under its influence a fresh low pressure area is likely to form in the first half of that week.
If that system develops and moves inland, it should drag the trough back south and reopen the moisture supply to the core monsoon zone. The IMD expects more widespread rainfall then, with isolated heavy to very heavy spells over central India, the west coast and other regions.
Until then, expect clear or lightly clouded skies over much of central, western and peninsular India, strong sunshine, rising maximum temperatures and oppressive, sweaty heat, since the moisture trapped near the surface pushes up the “feels-like” temperature even without rain.
WHY THIS BREAK MATTERS MORE THAN USUAL
Breaks are a normal feature of the monsoon. Most seasons see two to four of them. What makes this one uncomfortable is the arithmetic around it.
The monsoon arrived over Kerala on June 4 and covered the entire country by July 9, just a day behind schedule. But June delivered a deficit of about 40 per cent, and the early July burst only partially repaired the damage.
By July 8, the season’s rainfall stood 15.2 per cent below normal, at 195.5 mm against a long-period average of 230.4 mm. The long period average is simply the 50-year benchmark the IMD uses to define normal.
The IMD’s monthly outlook expects July rainfall for the country to be below normal, at less than 94 per cent of the month’s average of around 280.4 mm, and the seasonal forecast also leans below normal.
Mid-July is a sensitive window for agriculture. Kharif crops such as rice, cotton, soybean and maize, sown with the monsoon, are in their earliest and thirstiest growth stages.
A week without rain stresses young plants, slows reservoir filling and delays groundwater recharge, particularly in rainfed districts with little irrigation.
A one-week pause is survivable. The real question is what follows it. If the Bay of Bengal delivers its promised low pressure system next week, this break will be remembered as a breather.
If it does not, the fifth-driest June since 1901 will have found an unwelcome sequel.
– Ends
