India has a long tradition of scientific work or, long range forecasting of the southwest monsoon ever since the times of Blanford and Walker In the early Parts of this century, the recent decades have witnessed increased research in regard to the development of new long range forecast models in the India Meteorological Department which have, given correct long range (seasonal) forecasts of southwest monsoon rainfall, over the country as a whole, during, the successive four year~, 1988 to 1991, Presently, four models namely, Para-metric Power Regression, Dynamic Stochastic Transfer and Improved Multiple Regression models are being used for formulating the seasonal forecast of monsoon rainfall over the country as a whole, The forecast is issued in two stages, In the first stage a tentative inference which is qualitative in nature is issued before the middle of April based mainly on the Parametric model which utilizes signals from 16 regional and global parameters that are related to land, ocean and atmospheric forcing and show physical linkages with monsoon. In the second stage, a firm quantitative forecast is issued towards the end of the May and is based on the remaining three models mentioned above, although higher weight age is given to the Power Regression Model which has shown encouraging performance during the last four years. In this paper, these recently developed models and the scientific basis underlying these are discussed, Data on validation of these Operational models, used for the long range forecast during the past four years (1988-91) are also presented.
Variability of southwest monsoon rainfall over West Bengal
