The erstwhile cyclone Kyant has weakened into a deep depression out into the sea and will undergo further weakening before it can reach the East coast.

An India Met Department update said the remnant of Kyant was located 280 km south-southeast of Visakhapatnam; 370 km east-southeast of Machilipatnam; and 500 km east-southeast of Nellore on Thursday afternoon. The deep depression is expected to travel further west-southwestwards along the coast and weaken as a depression near the South Andhra Pradesh and North Tamil Nadu coast.

The US National Centre for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) has ventured to suggest that the depression may ultimately reach the Chennai coast, where it would make a quiet landfall.

Meanwhile, the IMD had forecast heavy rainfall at isolated places along Coastal Andhra Pradesh on Thursday. This is expected to continue well into Saturday.

North Coastal Tamil Nadu will start getting rains from Friday, followed by interior Tamil Nadu, South Interior Karnataka and Kerala, right until Monday.

North-East Monsoon In this manner, the North-East monsoon will have been established over the South Peninsula, but at least 10-12 days behind schedule.

This phase may also see the initiation of a low-pressure area/depression off the Myanmar coast but forecasts by a bevy of models put it on a track east-northeast towards the Bangladesh coast.

Meanwhile, the performance of the North-East monsoon will be eagerly monitored since most of the geography that it traditionally serves has been witnessing a drought-like situation after the failure of the preceding South-West monsoon.

The US Climate Prediction Centre, for one, is not very optimistic about the initial phase of the monsoon delivering significant amounts of rainfall over the peninsula until November 9.

Successor storm This is despite the forecasts by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts of another storm-like system developing in the Bay of Bengal and positioning itself off the Chennai coast by November 5.

But the latest update by the European Centre plots a track that takes the system away north-northeast along the coast towards Andhra Pradesh and Odisha.

This could deprive North Coastal Tamil Nadu around Chennai of its quota of rain from the system, as is clearly suggested by the US Climate Prediction Centre.

Kerala and parts of southern Tamil Nadu are predicted to receive reasonably good showers between November 3 and 11, according to the NCEP.

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