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Vinson Kurian

Thiruvananthapuram, Aug 12 Flood-ravaged Bihar and other parts of east and north-east India find themselves faced with the prospect of another round of unremitting downpour with Saturday’s ‘low’ in the northwest Bay of Bengal becoming ‘well marked.’

Currently biding its time on the warm waters of the northwest Bay, the system is on course to intensify into a depression before crossing the Orissa-West Bengal coast, an update by the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said on Sunday.

The threat of flood fury haunts Bihar and Uttar Pradesh mainly from the direction of movement of the depression – north-northwest over land, as against the typical west-northwest – which will take associated rain belt smack above these very territories. Availability of moisture from earlier flooding of these areas would only add fuel to the engine of the rain-bearing system, even adding to its staying power, unless acted upon by other invasive atmospheric systems.

In any case, IMD has warned of widespread rainfall with scattered heavy to very heavy falls and isolated extremely heavy falls over Orissa and coastal areas of West Bengal during the next two days.

Fairly widespread rainfall with isolated heavy to very heavy falls is also likely over remaining parts of West Bengal, Sikkim, Jharkhand, Bihar, east Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh during same period. Going forward, the rainfall activity will scale up further over Bihar and East Uttar Pradesh.

Meanwhile, the western end of the monsoon trough has already shifted to the foothills of the western Himalayas, which is expected to bring heavy rains over the hills and adjoining plains of northwest India. The Bay system will find itself moving in close proximity with this trough, and help kick up the rainfall activity even further.

The IMD said rain/thundershowers are likely at most places over Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand; at many places over Jammu and Kashmir, West Uttar Pradesh, Chandigarh and Delhi over the next three days. On Sunday, the axis of the monsoon trough passed through Ferozepur, Karnal, Shajahanpur, Kanpur, Asansol, the centre of the ‘low’ and, thence, southeastwards to east central Bay of Bengal.

An active but benign western Pacific would keep the buzz in the Bay of Bengal going in the short-to-medium term, helping maintain the train of weather events over the Indian territorial waters. Some weather models show the next ‘low’ springing up in the Bay as early as by the middle of this week.

This will be accompanied by the development of a major storm activity in the Philippine Sea (part of west Pacific), which is expected to spin up to typhoon strength in no time.

Headed for a landfall over the Chinese coast, the typhoon is predicted to send in a migrant system into the Bay, which might settle as a cyclonic circulation by August 21.

Meanwhile, two leading international weather models put the chance of a monsoon-friendly La Nina (colder counterpart of El Nino) developing over the equatorial Pacific around 50 per cent.

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Floods threaten to return to Bihar, UP

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