The Indian subcontinent witnessed a severe monsoon drought in the year 2009. India as a whole received 77% of its long period average during summer monsoon season (1 June to 30 September) of 2009, which is the third highest deficient all India monsoon season rainfall year during the period 1901–2009. Therefore, an attempt is made in this paper to study the characteristic features of summer monsoon rainfall of 2009 over the country and to investigate some of the possible causes behind the anomalous behaviour of the monsoon.

Where conservation resources are limited and conservation targets are diverse, robust yet flexible priority-setting frameworks are vital. Priority-setting is especially important for geographically widespread species with distinct populations subject to multiple threats that operate on different spatial and temporal scales. Marine turtles are widely distributed and exhibit intra-specific variations in population sizes and trends, as well as reproduction and morphology.

The climate of the Indian Ocean is dominated by monsoon reversals, influencing hydrography and biogeochemistry of the Indian Ocean as well as land vegetation through changes in precipitation. During summer or southwest monsoon season, intense upwelling zones driven by Ekman spiral appear in the western and eastern parts of the Arabian Sea that enhance surface primary production and thus proliferation of distinct fauna and flora.

Under the project 'Seasonal Prediction of the Indian Monsoon' (SPIM), the prediction of Indian summer monsoon rainfall by five atmospheric general circulation models (AGCMs) during 1985-2004 was assessed. The project was a collaborative effort of the coordinators and scientists from the different modelling groups across the country.

A state of the art model of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system, the climate forecast system (CFS), from the National Centres for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), USA, has been ported onto the PARAM Padma parallel computing system at the  Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), Bangalore and retrospective predictions for the summer monsoon (June-September) season of 2009 have