El Niño and Indian droughts: A scoping exercise

Weather experts around the world are foreseeing a strong El Niño in 2014. In India, these developments are feared to lead to droughts. In the last 14 years, out of the four El Niño years globally, three resulted in Indian droughts. Since the 1980s, all the six droughts faced by India were in El Niño years but not all El Niño years led to drought situations in the country. The paper approaches the question of disconnect between El Niño and Indian droughts by exploring the timing of El Niño developments in a year and its relation with monsoon rains. We construct an India specific El Niño (ISEL), based on tracking temperature anomalies of three months moving averages for specific months (April-May-June to September-October-November), captured in the Oceanic Niño Index (ONI). The choice of these months is dictated by the fact that June-September rainfall months must be part of three monthly moving ONI anomalies, either as the ending month or beginning month. ...