More extreme Indian monsoon daily rainfall in El Ni\~no summers

TL;DR

This study shows that El Niño events increase the likelihood of extreme daily rainfall in central and eastern India during the monsoon, despite overall summer drying, with implications for seasonal forecasting.

Contribution

It demonstrates the link between El Niño and monsoon rainfall extremes using a long-term observational dataset and a framework analyzing rainfall distributions and convective buoyancy.

Findings

El Niño increases extreme rainfall likelihoods in core monsoon regions.

Extreme rainfall is suppressed in drier, distant regions.

The patterns persist in seasonal forecast models.

Abstract

Extreme rainfall in the Indian summer monsoon can be destructive and deadly. Although El Ni\~no/ events in the equatorial Pacific make dry days and whole summers more likely throughout India, their influence on daily extremes is not well established. Despite this summer-mean drying effect, we show using observational data spanning 1901-2020 that El Ni\~no increases extreme rainfall likelihoods within monsoonal India, especially in the the summer's core rainy areas of central-eastern India and the narrow southwestern coastal band. Conversely, extremes are broadly suppressed in the drier southeast and far northwest, and more moderate accumulations are inhibited throughout the domain. These rainfall signals appear driven by corresponding ones in convective buoyancy, provided both the undilute instability of near-surface air and its dilution by mixing with drier air above are accounted for. When the summer ENSO state is predicted from a seasonal forecast ensemble initialized in May, the extreme rainfall patterns broadly persist, suggesting the potential for skillful seasonal forecasts. The framework of analyzing the full distributions of rainfall and convective buoyancy could be usefully applied to hourly extremes, other tropical regions under ENSO, other variability modes, and to trends in extreme rainfall under climate change.