The Hindu Business Line : IMD sees fresh buzz in southeast Bay

Thiruvananthapuram, Dec 1 India Meteorological Department (IMD) has notified the possibility of a fresh low-pressure area springing up over southeast Bay of Bengal by Wednesday and its subsequent westward movement (towards south-east India coast).

Advance information on this ‘low’ has been available from international models but subject, as is always the norm, to caveat that it is the best cross-checked with appropriate regional models to divine likely weather hazards.

On Monday, IMD notified only the initiation of the ‘low’ but peer models show its intensification and continued westward movement. It is shown impacting the Tamil Nadu coast around December 5.

After landfall and subsequent weakening, it would keep travelling west and enter the Arabian Sea, where, according to one model, it could reincarnate as a stronger system and travel north all along the west coast.

WESTERLY SYSTEM

But the storm-in-the-making would have to contend with accentuated westerly flows from intervening western disturbances crossing in from the northwest border.

Westerlies have been languishing for the most part in November and ‘there is a net one-month-lag with respect to their time (of the year) and cruising speed coordinates’, according to Captain Paresh Nerurkar, a senior Air India pilot, flying frequently in the sector until late last week.

Westerlies should sail at speeds 60-65 knots (111-120 km/hr) during November but the top speeds obtaining have rarely crossed the 20-knot-level (38 km/hr), Captain Nerurkar told Business Line.

This could be one reason why winter climes have been slow in settling over the plains of India’s north and northwest. In this context, incoming western disturbances will be watched with interest.

FEEBLE ‘LOW’

The IMD update said that the feeble ‘low’ over east-central and adjoining southeast Arabian Sea (remnant of cyclone ‘Nisha’) weakened as a trough of low extending from southeast Arabian Sea to the north Konkan and Goa coast.

But it is still capable of kicking up thundershowers at a few places over Gujarat, Konkan, Goa, madhya Maharashtra and Marathawada during the next 24 hours. Incoming moisture could waft into parts of central India in the form of rain or thundershowers over Vidarbha, southwest Madhya Pradesh and south Chhattisgarh. Extended outlook until Saturday indicated that scattered rainfall would persist over south peninsula and fairly widespread rainfall over Andaman and Nicobar.

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