The Hindu Business Line : Bay system moves parallel to coast

A numbered tropical storm 07B on Sunday, it lay centred about 350 km southeast of Nagapattinam by noon and was preparing to move west-northwest in its onward journey. According to the India Meteorological Department (IMD), the system will intensify further and set up a landfall on the north Tamil Nadu coast by Monday evening.

This is an outlook shared by the Ohio State University in the US as well. The New Delhi-based National Centre for Medium Range Forecasting (NCMRWF) concurred with the outlook for `slow' intensification, but said 07B would now perhaps inch its way north-northeast over the next two-three days under the influence of a large westerly trough coming in from the opposite direction.

Graphics put out by the Joint Typhoon Warning Centre (JTWC) also depicted that the system may head north-northeast parallel to the coastline and give Chennai the skip for a landfall point. The UK Met Office was in agreement, indicating that the storm might dissipate over the waters in the North Bay of Bengal to the southeast of Vishakhapatnam.

07B combined dexterity with opportunism during the last 36 hours to constantly shift positions and make use of the feeblest warming anomaly (0 to 0.5 deg C) over the seawaters. This helped it conserve precious fuel for the heat engine, sustain itself as a whole and even intensify in the process, said Dr K. J. Ramesh of the NCMRWF. He said he was surprised by its remarkable survival instincts.

The markedly changed but helpful atmospheric dynamics of the weekend also helped in no small measure, with the east-west shear zone getting elongated to as far east as the equatorial western Pacific. There are concurrent tropical cyclone alerts in the Philippine region as well as the Indonesia waters to the south.

07B has proved to be unpredictable to hazard a guess on whether it will intensify into a full-fledged cyclone. On Sunday noon, the estimated central pressure was 987 hectoPascals (the lesser the pressure, the severe the storm). The lower central pressure limit for a system to be classified as a cyclone is 980 hectoPascals - seven less than the latest count. Over the last 36 hours, the pressure had dropped by 10 hectoPascals.

In its update, the NCMRWF said coastal Tamil Nadu, south coastal Andhra Pradesh and the Bay Islands received scattered to fairly widespread rains over the last 12 to18 hours. O7B had intensified in terms of cloud bands organisation, deepened central pressure and enhanced sustained wind pattern.

It packed winds with speeds reaching a maximum sustained 75 to 80 km/h at noon on Sunday. South Andhra Pradesh experienced onshore winds reaching 35-40 km/h in speed right from the morning.

Model prediction further suggests that stronger winds with speeds around 60 km/h are likely along north coastal Tamil Nadu and coastal Andhra Pradesh during the next two to three days. Fairly widespread to widespread rainfall with isolated heavy to very heavy rains have been forecast over coastal Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry and coastal Andhra Pradesh.

Scattered to fairly widespread rains are expected over Kerala, Lakshadweep, Rayalaseema, south interior Karnataka and Telangana in coming days.

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