Monsoon-2026: Curtains Drawn - Season Ends With Drought

Key Takeaways:

• Southwest Monsoon 2026 ended with a 13% seasonal rainfall deficit, resulting in a mild drought.
• India recorded a monsoon drought after a gap of nine years, following the back-to-back droughts of 2014 and 2015.
• Uneven rainfall, fewer weather systems in June and a prolonged monsoon break in August adversely affected seasonal rainfall distribution.
• Nearly 50% of India remained rain-deficient, while Odisha recorded a substantial 30% rainfall surplus.

Curtains have been drawn on Southwest Monsoon 2026. The monsoon has ended with a seasonal rain deficit of 13% and, therefore, will be termed a ‘mild drought’. Any shortfall in excess of 10% of the Long Period Average (LPA) falls in the drought category. The Indian monsoon had witnessed the last drought in 2015. It observed a decent monsoon cycle between 2016 and 2025, when the seasonal rainfall was normal or above normal for seven out of nine years.

Speculations on the monsoon begin within a couple of months of the conclusion of the previous season. Monsoon 2026 started getting deliberated much earlier, as there were early signs of likely El Niño conditions in the Pacific Ocean. Jatin Singh, Managing Director, Skymet, shared his concern with the media as early as December 2025. He stated, “More than a full-blown El Niño, what is more worrisome is an evolving El Niño, which has a 60% chance of causing below-normal rains.”

Monsoon 2026 began on a controversial note, under the scare of a very strong El Niño. This mega event had started evolving in the early winter of 2026. The asymmetrical onset of the monsoon and paucity of weather systems in June ensued in skewed rainfall distribution, leaving a large rainfall deficit of 35% of LPA. The month of July saved the grace, wherein the core monsoon rainfed zone of the country witnessed equitable rainfall. However, the prolonged ‘break in monsoon’ in August ruined the spatiotemporal distribution across the country. The season started heading for a drought, on identical lines as predicted by Skymet, at the halfway mark of the southwest monsoon season.

A seasonal rainfall deficit of 14%-15% persisted till the last week of September. However, the appearance of an outlier tropical storm, otherwise rarely seen during the monsoon, brought a damaging deluge in some states along the Indo-Gangetic plains. Courtesy of extremely heavy rainfall, the monsoon deficit was also reduced to 12% at the fag end of the month. The monsoon season, as such, has ended with a mild drought, having a seasonal shortfall of 13% rainfall. The country has recorded a drought after a gap of nine years, since the time back-to-back droughts struck during 2014-2015.

The Indian monsoon is largely controlled by oceanic conditions, with the far Pacific and, closer home, the Indian Ocean. The Indian Ocean Dipole defied the earlier prediction of turning positive during the monsoon. The index anomaly persistently stayed neutral, albeit crossing the positive threshold during the second half of September 2026. But it was too late to make an impact.

The El Niño phenomenon became ‘strong’ in August and strengthened further to the ‘very strong’ category in September 2026. The temperature anomaly in the Niño 3.4 region, the marker index for El Niño, centred on September 16, 2026, climbed to +3°C. This was the highest value of the index since reliable records started in 1950. Further, the subsurface temperature anomaly exceeded climatological values by more than 8°C.

Notwithstanding, the extreme values of the index do not necessarily have a proportionately severe impact on climate and weather patterns. A weak El Niño can adversely impact the monsoon as much as a strong event. Yes, such unique and explosive warming of the ocean sea surface ensures that the event will not collapse in between and also secures longevity, much beyond the normal timelines of nine to twelve months.

The highlights of Monsoon 2026 are that nearly 50% of the country’s area has remained rain-deficient, while the rest has recorded normal-to-above-normal rainfall. There are pockets of distress in all four homogeneous regions.

Perpetual rain-deficit states of Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh recovered from the syndrome of ‘sketchy’ states. Odisha outperformed all other states and amassed a huge surplus of 30% rainfall of LPA. Overall, the extreme impact of ‘Super El Niño’, as envisaged earlier, seemingly has been averted.