Rain belt shifts to Vidarbha, Chhattisgarh, rest of East India

The rain-driving low-pressure area had weakened but was persisting over Vidarbha, south Chhattisgarh and south-east Madhya Pradesh on Monday.

The ‘low’ has also set up a trough linking Vidarbha with Telangana, east Madhya Pradesh and east Uttar Pradesh, potentially bringing the wet weather to these parts also.

In addition, an incoming cyclonic circulation from the Gulf of Thailand has travelled west-northwest and dropped anchor over the East-central Bay of Bengal.

Forecasts suggest that this circulation will merge into the trough lying over land and set up an intensified low-pressure area soon after September 30, when the monsoon officially draws to a close.

This would push a fresh rain spell over East India from the weekend (and into October), an outlook that the India Met Department (IMD) also shares.

On Monday, the overnight heavy rain over northern parts of the peninsula helped bring down the rain deficit for the country as a whole to 3 per cent.

The monsoon was ‘vigorous’ over Chhattisgarh and ‘active’ over the hills of Bengal, Sikkim, Bihar, Jharkhand, Telangana, and Vidarbha.

Heavy rain was reported from isolated places in east Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Bihar during the 24 hours ending on Monday morning.

The deficit over East and North-East India has been brought down to -11 per cent and over the South Peninsula to -7 per cent.

On the other hand, North-West India has seen itself slip increasingly into deficit, which is at -5 per cent. This region had built up a significantly large surplus mid-way through the monsoon.

Instead, Central India alone is in surplus now, and looks to further consolidate its position going into the rest of the month (that is, over the next four days) and later into early October.

The IMD has said that conditions are becoming favourable for the South-West monsoon to resume its withdrawal process from parts of west Rajasthan over the next three days.

It is also expected that the process will once again run into a wall of moisture over North-East India and East India and resultant rains from early October and get stalled.

According to the US National Centre for Environmental Prediction, the withdrawal line would be stuck over Central India until October 12.

By then, the monsoon would have exited the States of Rajasthan, Punjab, Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana and Delhi in North-West India as well as Gujarat in West India.

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