The Hindu Business Line : Belt of torrential rain moving to East

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Thiruvananthapuram, Feb. 13 The belt of torrential rainfall is moving from the northwest of the country to further east in a phase which saw even Rajasthan being swamped in a near repeat of a quirkily wet southwest monsoon that hit the desert State last year.

Though not to that scale, the skies came down heavily on Bikaner this time round with as much as 8.4 cm of rain falling on Monday.

Mr Jim Andrews of Accuweather.com notes that Bikaner has an average annual rainfall of only 30 cm, most of which falls during the southwest monsoon. The February average is just 0.7 cm.

The "big and complex" winter storm has lived up to expectation with respect to rainfall over northern India and much of Pakistan. For India, these are the first widespread, meaningful winter rains of the season, about one month late.

Rajasthan, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttaranchal, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh (north) got the best of these rains, as did Punjab and the Northwest Frontier in Pakistan. There will be another two days of rain over the subcontinent.

An overall eastward shift will see northeastern Pakistan dry out first whereas meaningful and locally heavy rains will break out over eastern India and Bangladesh as more such rains fall over the north into Nepal. Last of these rains will end in the far northeast on Thursday.

Both the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) and the India Meteorological Department (IMD) have issued identical outlook indicating an eastward shift in the rain belt.

Cold wave conditions may set in once the skies are cleared but may not last long given the expected arrival of another western disturbance by this weekend. According to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), this system will cause a `flare-up' to the east/northeast of the country on Wednesday/Thursday next (February 22/23). This will be a fall-out from an anticipated interaction with an existing cyclonic circulation in the region.

A global analysis of weather suggests that the first spell of substantial winter rains in an otherwise dry North and northwest India has coincided with the influx of an extensive cold wave in the US northeast matched by a let-up in some of the worst monsoon flooding ever to hit Indonesia.

It can be further seen that all these had a running common thread — the weakening of El Nino conditions in the Equatorial and East Pacific. Though no direct cause-effect relationship has been established, the coincidence is hard to miss, say some meteorologists.

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