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RESEARCH COMMUNICATIONS
CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 91, NO. 3, 10 AUGUST 2006350*For correspondence. (e-mail: rni@civil.iisc.ernet.in)22. Signoret, P. A., Bernaux, P. C. and Poinso, B., Soybean diseasesin France in 1974.
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, 24–27.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. We thank all the Directors of NBPGR,New Delhi during 1976–2005 for encouragement and facilities. Thanksare also due to Drs R. C. Agrawal and Hanuman Lal Raiger, NBPGRfor statistical analysis.Received 25 July 2005; revised accepted 20 March 2006
Forecasting of seasonal monsoonrainfall at subdivision level
R. N. Iyengar
1,
* and S. T. G. Raghu Kanth
2
 
1
Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Science,Bangalore 560 012, India
2
Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology,Guwahati 781 039, India
It is shown that time series data of monsoon seasonalrainfall at subdivision level is decomposable into sixuncorrelated components. These narrowband processescalled intrinsic mode functions, in decreasing order of importance, reflect the influence of ENSO, sunspot acti-vity and tidal cycle on inter annual rainfall variability.The decomposition helps in proposing a statisticalmethod to forecast monsoon rainfall in the three sub-divisions of Karnataka.Keywords:
Forecasting, intrinsic mode functions, rain-fall, subdivisions.I
NDIAN
rainfall data are available at two spatial scales in thearchives of IITM, Pune (www.tropmet.res.in). The countryis considered to be consisting of 33 subdivisions for re-porting the monthly rainfall data for the period 1871–2004. This is the smaller spatial scale database. Anotherdatabase, consisting of the monthly rainfall at the largerspatial scale of eight regions including one at all-Indialevel, is also made available. Recently, we have proposed
1
 an approach to analyse and forecast monsoon rainfall dataof the regional and all-India time series. The method isbased on decomposing the data into empirical modescalled Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs). The regional-leveldata have a coefficient of variation defined as the ratio of standard deviation to climatic average (
σ
 / 
m
), ranging from10 to 18%. The efficiency of the IMF model in one-step-ahead forecasting is about 80%. Thus, the model is ableto capture the most important inter-annual variability sig-natures on the larger spatial scale. A known property of rainfall data is that on larger scales, the variability tendsto decrease due to smoothening or averaging effects.Thus, subdivision-level data will show higher variabilityin comparison with regional data. Since IMF modeldecomposes the time series into basic uncorrelated em-pirical modes, one would expect the approach to be quali-tatively valid at any scale. However, the forecasting skillwill depend on how best the temporal patterns of the sig-natures are translated into the decomposed modes. Thepresent investigation is aimed at studying the basic modespresent in subdivision-level rainfall data, with a view to-wards forecasting the amount of rainfall.Rainfall data are available for 33 subdivisions (SD),which make up the geographical extent of the country.The data have been extensively studied for understandingspatial and inter-annual variability (IAV) of the mon-soon
2–5
. Also, the data have been used to study the relation-ship between rainfall and other atmospheric processes suchas quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO)
6
, Southern oscillationindex (SOI)
7
and sunspot index
8
. In spite of the existence of long-term variability or memory signatures, quantitativeforecasting of rainfall has remained a daunting task 
9
.Here, seasonal (June–September) data of three subdivi-sions are selected for further study. These are SDs 31, 32and 33 covering the State of Karnataka (Figure 1). Thisselection is based on previous studies
10
on the variabilitystructure of station-level rainfall in Karnataka. It wasfound that broadly the State comprises of three homoge-nous regions nearly overlapping with the three IMD sub-divisions. It was also found that coastal Karnataka (SD-31) has a significant transition probability structure fromJune to July. There is a tendency for below-normal Junerainfall to be compensated by above-normal rainfall in July.Parthasarathy and Pant
7
have shown that rainfall in theabove subdivisions is well correlated with QBO and thatthe data are significantly correlated at 14-year lag. The basicstatistics of the data considered here is given in Table 1.Monsoon rainfall evolves in a random fashion around afew central periods. This can be seen by spectral analysis,wavelet or principal component analysis. Recently, it has
 
RESEARCH COMMUNICATIONS
CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 91, NO. 3, 10 AUGUST 2006351
Table 1.
Subdivision (IITM data 1871–1990)
 
Sub- Mean SD COVdivision Name
m
R
Cm.
σ
R
Cm. (
σ
R
 / 
m
R
) % Skewness Kurtosis31 COKNT 285.22 50.94 15.42 0.624 4.31032 NIKNT 60.09 11.96 19.90 0.185 2.84733 SIKNT 50.33 10.19 20.25 0.334 2.752
Table 2.
Central period of the IMFs in years and % variance contributed to IAV
 
IMF
1
IMF
2
IMF
3
IMF
4
IMF
5
 Region
T 
IAV%
T 
IAV%
T 
IAV%
T 
IAV%
T 
IAV%COKNT 2.55 60.7 5.71 31.7 12 10.5 18 4.3 40 1.0NIKNT 3 62.4 5.71 17.6 12 11.9 20 6.6 60 4.1SIKNT 2.86 69.7 5.45 20.5 10.9 4.5 24 1.6 60 3.1
Figure 1.
Meteorological subdivisions of India and Karnataka.
been shown that the empirical mode decomposition pro-posed by Huang
et al.
11
has distinct advantages over othermethods in identifying the dominant periods and theiramplitudes. This method decomposes the data series intofinite number of empirical modes called IMFs. These areuncorrelated with each other at zero lag, but correlatedwith the original data in a decreasing order of importance.IMF is a data-derived function such that in its interval of definition, the number of zeros and extrema is equal ordiffers as at most by one. Each IMF is a narrow bandprocess with an identifiable central period. In Figure 2
 
a
–
c
,the present data and their IMFs are shown. The sum of theIMFs will be equal to the original data at every time instant,that is
 R
(
t 
) =
∑
IMF
i
(
t 
). In each of the figures, data varianceand variance of each mode are also presented. It is observedthat IMFs can be organized with decreasing level of im-portance. The sum of variances of IMFs should be ideallyequal to the data variance. However, it is observed thatthe last two IMFs get correlated due to round-off errorsand hence the precise decomposition of variance may notalways be achieved.In Table 2, the central period of the IMFs and the per-centage of variability explained by each IMF are given.The last IMF in all the three cases is the climatic normal,which can be taken to be deterministic. Table 3 shows thecorrelation matrix of the IMFs. IMF
1
is the predominantmode, with an average period of about 2.7 years, contribut-ing to more than 60% of IAV. It is also the mode maximallycorrelated with the basic data. Like with the regional-scale data studied previously
1
, here also IMF
1
and IMF
2
 are connected with QBO and ENSO, which show quasi-periodic behaviour with a central period of 2–5 years.IMF
3
can be associated with the 11-year sun-spot cycle.IMF
4
most probably reflects tidal forcing linked to theMetonic cycle of 18–19 years. It is important to verifywhether the extracted IMFs are spurious signatures of anoriginally uncorrelated random noise data sample. In Figure 3,the white noise test developed by Wu and Huang
12
is appliedon the IMFs of the three subdivisions. For a strict whitenoise, the variance of the IMFs and their respective cen-tral periods varies linearly on a double log plot. Thus forthe data to be accepted as pure noise, all the variance valueshave to lie within the 99% confidence band of acceptance.It is observed that the null hypothesis that original data arewhite noise with no patterns gets rejected. This indicatesthe possibility of statistical forecasting of the data seriesthrough modelling and forecasting of the IMFs.
 
A model is a mathematical equation or an algorithmthat can closely replicate the data of a particular lengthwith minimum error. Since such a model is not unique, theefficiency of any particular model can only be verified bycomparing it with other claimants in a specified period of 
 
RESEARCH COMMUNICATIONS
CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 91, NO. 3, 10 AUGUST 2006352 
Figure 2.
IMFs of COKNT rainfall (
 a
), NIKNT rainfall (
 b
) and SIKNT rainfall (
 c
).
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