When Two Similar El Niño Events Produced Different Indian Summer Monsoons: Insights from 1997 and 2015
Background One of the most intriguing questions in climate science is why the Indian summer monsoon behaves so differently even when large-scale climate conditions appear remarkably similar. Consider the years 1997 and 2015, for example. Both years witnessed one of the strongest El Niño events on record, accompanied by a positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD). Based on these two climate signals alone, one might expect the Indian summer monsoon to respond in a similar way. Yet the outcomes were strikingly different. 1997: India received normal monsoon rainfall. 2015: India experienced a below-normal monsoon, with widespread rainfall deficits. This intriguing contrast motivated our recent study, published in Atmospheric Research , where we investigated why two seemingly similar climate years produced such different monsoon outcomes. Figure 1. Seasonal rainfall anomalies over India during the monsoon seasons of 1997 and 2015 , along with their difference (1997–2015). Although both year...