El Niño–Southern Oscillation has long been blamed for weakening India’s summer monsoon. But a new study shows a surprising twist: El Niño may trigger more intense daily rain in Central India, even while it decreases the season’s overall rainfall. Drawing on more than a century of weather records, researchers report that Central India is experiencing sharper, shorter cloudbursts whenever Pacific waters warm up, and those downpours are becoming more intense.

Study Highlights and Key Findings

The research team, which was led by Spencer A. Hill along with Destiny Zamir Meyers, Adam H. Sobel, Michela Biasutti, Mark A. Cane, Michael K. Tippett, and Fiaz Ahmed, estimated daily rainfall patterns from 1901 to 2020.

Their findings, which were published on arXiv, show that while El Niño years typically bring less total rain, the odds of a single day dumping more than 10 centimetres of water jump noticeably across the heart of India’s rain belt.

Historical records confirm that up to the early last century, Central India averaged about nine of these intensive downpours each monsoon season. Today, that number is closer to 18. Another investigation in Nature Communications found a threefold expansion in widespread extreme rain events between 1950 and 2015, even as average seasonal rainfall fell by about 10 percent. Seasonal forecast models, including those which are used by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology and the India Meteorological Department, were able to reproduce the pattern when started in May – meaning there’s real potential for better early warnings.

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Implications for Central India

There were the following implications that came up:

• If El Niño may trigger more intense daily rain in central India, farmers in some states such as Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh will face crop losses because a single storm that drops more than 100 mm can flatten young plants and wash away the fertile topsoil.
• Some cities, including Bhopal, Nagpur, and Raipur, will make every effort to cope when sudden cloudbursts swamp drainage systems, bringing traffic to a halt and expanding the risk of water-borne disease.
• State disaster agencies will need to make their embankments stronger, boost stormwater drains, and modernize early-warning networks if they hope to keep residents safe and secure.
• National forecasters such as the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services can use the research to shape the seasonal outlooks so that farmers and city planners have weeks of lead time before the heaviest rains arrive.
• Economists warned that without such preparation, the increasing number of extreme rain days could push up recovery costs and force repeated displacement of vulnerable communities.

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The Bottom Line

The evidence is now hard to avoid: El Niño may trigger more intense daily rain in Central India, even though the total monsoon is trending drier. The region has already seen a near doubling of days with more than 10 cm of rainfall and a 75 percent increment in events topping 150 mm.

For policymakers, this means stronger and secure stormwater systems, bright farming strategies, and rapid early warnings. For tenants, it means preparing for cloudbursts that arrive suddenly and with greater force. With El Niño events expected to remain a regular characteristic of a warming climate, taking these steps now is the surest way to decrease the human and economic cost of the next extreme monsoon.

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