Overview

• In El Niño summers, very heavy daily rainfall becomes much more likely in India’s climatologically wetter zones, with increases exceeding 50% in some areas.
• Light and moderate rain decline during El Niño, and typically drier regions see fewer rainy days and weaker showers that compound dryness.
• The study reports a persistent El Niño signal for extremes even as its influence on average monsoon rainfall has weakened in recent decades.
• Regional patterns show more extreme days in central India and along the southwest coast, with decreases in the southeast and northwest.
• Researchers used a cutoff-accumulation metric on high-resolution observations from 1901 to 2020, and they note implications for forecasting and for tropical extremes under climate change.