Asia Update #39: Rainfall stabilizes over most of India

After months of trying to pin down the Indian Monsoon, it finally has stabilized, leaving out only northeast India, and parts of Bangladesh. Southeast Asia has also continued to improve, although Cambodia is slightly off of it's normal precipitation. Further north very dry conditions have returned to the Korean Peninsula and parts of China.

Rather than use the graphics at the CPC, like I normally do, this week I am going to take the one from the India Meteorological Department, as those do a better job at showing what is happening across south Asia right now. Rainfall has stabilized, and looks good, across most of India, along with Pakistan and Nepal. There are couple of trouble spots, however, in eastern Gujarat, southwestern Andhra Pradesh and across the Northeast. That means that eastern Bhutan and eastern Bangladesh are also still struggling. This is still a major improvement over what had been happening in south Asia thus far this season.

The dryness in northeast India, does extend into Burma, but the rest of southeast Asia looks good. Cambodia and nearby parts of Laos and Vietnam are a bit dry, however these areas largely rely of the annual flood of the Mekong. Unfortunately the headwaters of the Mekong River are in parched areas of both China and Burma, this is potentially a growing cause for concern. There is a disturbance developing off the east coast of the Philippines. This could develop into something more serious, possibly even a typhoon, later today or tomorrow. Right now the system is just a depression.

This past week was very dry across the Korean Peninsula and that dryness extends northward into Manchuria in China. Elsewhere in China rainfall was spotty, however there was moderate rainfall extending from just west of Shanghai down to Hong Kong, which did help relieve the ongoing drought in this area.