The Hindu Business Line : Buzzing peninsular seas raring to go

Thiruvananthapuram, June 23 There is increasing convergence in international and domestic weather model prognostications about the possibility of the peninsular seas breaking into a song later this week to send the monsoon pirouetting to a new high.

On Monday, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) maintained its outlook for a monsoon weather-maker (likely depression) in the northwest Bay of Bengal around June 28.

Interestingly, media reports quoted the Pakistan Meteorological Department having issued a warning to the effect that the southwest monsoon (July-August) could witness above normal rainfall and floods. The International Research Institute (IRI) for Climate Prediction at the University of Columbia had come out with this outlook in its latest seasonal forecasts for the subcontinent.

Closer home, the Noida-based National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) had last week mentioned about a preparatory cyclonic circulation taking shape in the northwest Bay and intensifying in due course.

SYSTEM DUO

The NCMRWF on Monday come out with a forecast suggesting the formation of an upper air cyclonic circulation in the north Arabian Sea on June 26 around the same time as the counterpart circulation is tipped to materialise in the northwest Bay.

On Monday, the ECMWF too backed up this outlook saying that a circulation might throw itself up first in the northeast Arabian Sea, close to Konkan coast, but would track initially west into west-central Arabian Sea.

The system would be pulled back by a westerly trough drifting in from the northwest border and making room to plunge into the Arabian Sea. The counterpart Bay system too would get scooped up in this manner.

It would now appear that the Arabian Sea system would go to set up the mid-tropospheric cyclone (MTC) off the south Gujarat and Konkan coasts, a forecast that India Meteorological Department (IMD) maintained on Monday. Almost on cue, the Bay system is predicted to intensify along the Orissa-Andhra Pradesh coast.

MTC represents an active phase of monsoon, and translates into widespread rainfall into adjoining northwest and central India when combining with an incoming monsoon depression from the northwest Bay. The offshore trough along the Gujarat-Kerala coasts provides the perfect foil for the evolving weather.

The depression and the MTC are known to feed into each other, driving up rainfall all over. South Gujarat and the Konkan-Mumbai coasts could witness heavy to very heavy precipitation during this period.

BUSY SESSION

Now, if things were to turn out as predicted, they would make for a twin-engined monsoon firing on all cylinders. It is expected that the entire south peninsula would be brought under a bustling wet session.

This is a more or less the scenario being visualised by the US-based Centre for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies (COLA), which sees rainfall maxima sitting over Mumbai-Konkan and coastal Karnataka on the west coast and along the southeast coast during July 1-9.

Seasonal forecast for July-August-September from the ECMWF suggested that southern peninsular India, especially the extreme south peninsula, would receive excess precipitation. This could largely hold during the August-September-October as well.

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