This year’s monsoon season is likely to bring below-normal rainfall. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has said the country as a whole was expected to receive only 92% of normal rainfall this season. This forecast, however, does not capture the intra-seasonal and regional variations in rainfall that are a standard feature of Indian monsoon. These would become evident only at a later stage. The below-normal rainfall forecast, for example, is no indicator of the number of extreme rainfall events that are likely to occur this coming season. These kinds of events have been steadily increasing over the last decade or two, and have routinely turned into, or triggered, large-scale disasters. Several studies have linked the increasing trend of such incidents in recent years to climate change. In the past decade or so, starting with the Kedarnath tragedy in 2013, India has seen at least one major rainfall-related disaster every year ( Table 1 ).…