Long dry spells of short return periods during southwest monsoon along the Konkan coast

Abstract

The southwest monsoon strikes the Konkan coast in the first week of the June and withdraws by the first week of October. The period June to September, being not the period of continuous rain, the pulsatory character of the monsoon is a very important feature. Since temporary monsoon breaks cause great anxiety in the country, an attempt has been made to examine how prolonged, on the average, are the monsoon breaks for various return periods, for certain stations along the west coast of India. As Lawrence (1957) after calculating the frequencies of runs of dry days of different lengths for some stations in southern and eastern England using Jenkinson probalility' method found that it does not provide reasonsable estimates of frequencies, the author has analysed the data by the techniques of extreme values statistical analysis. The values of length of runs of dry days during the southwest monsoon for 2, 5, 10 and 25 years return period for Karwar, Marmagoa, Ratnagiri, Bombay (Colaba) and Surat have been found.