India just posted a nationwide rainfall deficit of about 40 percent for June, the fifth driest since records began. IMD is calling for another below normal month in July. Here is the honest, sourced case for why the strengthening El Niño is a plausible driver, and why the usual offset isn't showing up this year.
Every ENSO monitoring site eventually has to reckon with the fact that the biggest, most consequential impacts of El Niño rarely show up in the country running the world's most famous ENSO tracking agency. They show up in monsoon rainfall over South Asia, where hundreds of millions of livelihoods hinge on whether the June through September rains arrive on schedule and in full. This year, the early numbers are not encouraging, and the mechanism behind them is one worth explaining in plain terms rather than headlines.
India recorded 99.5 mm of rainfall nationwide in June 2026 against a normal of 165.3 mm, a deficit of 39.8 percent, according to weather department data reported by Reuters on June 30. That makes it the driest June in more than a decade and the fifth driest since IMD's records begin in 1901. Reuters attributes part of the shortfall to a delayed monsoon advance, with the seasonal rains reaching Kerala three days late and stalling for roughly two weeks over western farming regions.
The regional breakdown, per IMD's own June rainfall summary as reported by Business Standard, is more striking than the national figure: east and northeast India logged their lowest June rainfall on record for the region, at 197.5 mm, while central India had its seventh driest June on record, with 84.4 mm.
IMD's monthly outlook, issued June 30, calls for July rainfall below 94 percent of the long period average nationwide. That matters more than it sounds, because July is climatologically the wettest month of the southwest monsoon, contributing roughly 32 percent of the seasonal total and carrying outsized weight for kharif sowing of rain fed crops like paddy, pulses, and oilseeds. A weak July on top of a weak June compounds the risk to sowing windows and reservoir replenishment rather than simply adding to a single bad month.
NOAA's Climate Prediction Center has an El Niño Advisory in effect, and the event has continued strengthening through June, with the weekly Niño 3.4 reading climbing to roughly +1.7°C as of mid June. NOAA-linked reporting now puts the odds of a very strong event, meaning Niño 3.4 anomalies at or above +2.0°C, at around 63 percent for the November 2026 through January 2027 window, with a near 90 percent chance the event peaks as strong or very strong this winter. That is a probability estimate with real uncertainty attached, not a settled outcome, and CPC's own communications continue to stress that stronger events tilt the odds toward certain impacts without guaranteeing them. IMD itself has connected the dots publicly: in its own commentary on the below normal July outlook, the agency noted that El Niño conditions are prevailing in the equatorial Pacific and are expected to strengthen through the rest of the monsoon season, and that this could be one of the reasons for the rainfall suppression seen in both June and the July forecast.
This lines up with the long documented, if imperfect, statistical relationship between El Niño and the Indian Summer Monsoon. El Niño years tend to run drier across India's June to September rains, largely through the same weakened Walker circulation and altered trade wind pattern that defines ENSO in the first place. The relationship is not new science and it is not exotic. It is also not deterministic. The strength of the ENSO to ISM link has been shown to weaken and strengthen across decades. It notably loosened during the 1980s and 1990s before reasserting itself around 1999 to 2000, and individual seasons can and do break from the historical tendency.
One of the more useful, underexplained wrinkles in this story is the Indian Ocean Dipole. A positive IOD, marked by cooler water off Sumatra and Java and warmer water in the western Indian Ocean, has historically been able to partially offset El Niño's drying influence on Indian rainfall by enhancing monsoon moisture in some sectors even while the Pacific signal leans dry. It is one of the more well documented cross basin interactions in the ENSO literature, and the kind of nuance a "no hype" ENSO site exists to surface.
That offset does not appear to be available this year. IMD's latest outlook, as reported by Down To Earth, describes the IOD as neutral at present, with that condition expected to persist through the monsoon season. Unless that shifts positive later in the season, one of the few mechanisms that could meaningfully soften the El Niño drying signal over India in 2026 is not clearly in play. It does not guarantee a poor monsoon on its own, since the ENSO to ISM relationship is probabilistic rather than deterministic, but it does mean one of the usual mitigating factors is off the table for now.
None of this is a forecast of drought. It is a description of where the numbers currently sit: a historically dry June, a below normal July outlook from the agency that actually forecasts Indian rainfall, a strengthening El Niño that IMD itself has cited as a contributing factor, and a neutral IOD that removes one of the few historical offsets to that pattern. The honest caveat, as always, is that ENSO to ISM relationships have exceptions, this season is not over, and IMD's own monthly outlooks will be the numbers to watch as the rest of the season unfolds.