  For two cases of empirical monsoon onset prediction it is argued that current
verification practice leads to optimistically biased skill, caused by the
intricacy of the model setup. For the case of the operational forecasts by the
Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) it leads to an overlap of model
definition and verification data. A more seriously flawed verification was used
in a recent method based on trend extrapolations of 'tipping elements' (TE).
Claims of TE of predicting onset 2 weeks earlier than other methods are
unjustified. On the contrary, the correlation between TE forecasts and
observations is as low as 0.24 and compares poorly to the reported IMD
correlation of 0.78. That latter value likely being artificially inflated,
currently the best and most reliable monsoon onset predictions come from a
dynamical model with more reliable skill values of about 0.7.
