The Hindu Business Line : Peninsular coast gains at northwest’s cost

Thiruvananthapuram, Feb. 15 Peninsular India has witnessed some of the heaviest winter rainfall, until now, with coastal Andhra Pradesh (+668 per cent), south interior Karnataka (+452 per cent) and Rayalaseema (+364 per cent) topping the charts.

This was occasioned with moisture-laden easterly-to-southeasterlies re-curving over the peninsular tip to blow into a sustained trough aligned along the southeast coast. Though tipped to dry up in another five days, the moisture pipeline could get re-established in due course, if predictions by international weather models are anything to go by.

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) sees upcountry westerly winds dipping progressively down to the southeast (sweeping even the Tamil Nadu coast) to blow away any chance of moisture incursion into the peninsular interior in the medium term.

But isolated rain events are predicted to occur beyond this belt, but confined to the peninsular tip. The US National Centres for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) says that the ongoing wet session could, thus, get locally extended to February 22.

EAST TOO BENEFITS

East India too, benefited from the proceedings as opportunistic upper air cyclonic circulations helped pull in available moisture over this region. Gangetic West Bengal (+131 per cent), Orissa (+126 per cent) and Bihar (+107 per cent) recorded excess rainfall in this manner. The few peninsular regions drawing a blank are Madhya Maharashtra and Konkan (-100 per cent each); Marathawada (-92 per cent) and Vidarbha (-60 per cent).

North and northwest India presented a totally different picture with red splashed all over save Jammu and Kashmir (+84 per cent) and Himachal Pradesh (-9 per cent). Those running up significant deficits are west Uttar Pradesh and east Rajasthan (-99 per cent each); Gujarat (-98 per cent); west Madhya Pradesh (-97 per cent); and west Rajasthan (-90 per cent). The poor run in these regions has been attributed to the prevailing La Nina event in the Pacific basin.

The NCEP model says that cold to average cold conditions are set to prevail over the plains of the northwest and the Indo-Gangetic plains. This is expected to help the prospects of the standing Rabi wheat crop.

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