Will fresh Pacific storm do Indian monsoon a favour?

It is looking like ‘typhoon time’ again in northwest Pacific, with a tropical depression doing the prowl to the east-southeast of Anderson Air Force Base, Guam.

Already a ‘numbered tropical cyclone (typhoon) 09W’ or ninth in the series this year, the system is forecast to grow into a typhoon and take a mostly westward course.

Westward track

The track would take it straight towards the northern tip of the Philippines, the favourite whipping boy of Pacific typhoons.

‘Numbering’ of a weather system is the penultimate step of giving it an assigned name (Rammasun, in the instance case) when it reaches typhoon threshold.

09W steams away hot on the heels of super typhoon Neoguri that has just made a landfall over Japan, after travelling north-northeast all the way from northwest Pacific.

In doing so, Neoguri had undermined the Indian monsoon spiriting away as it did most of the flows from the Arabian Sea that would other have accrued to it.

Neoguri impact

The monsoon stalled in the bargain, and had to spend a fifth straight uninspiring week after its delayed and weak onset, delivering a rainfall deficit of 41 per cent over India.

This morning, the NASA and US Joint Typhoon Warning Centre said that ‘09W’ might take a mostly westward track in what looks like the only concession made to the Indian monsoon.

This is unlike Neoguri that took the east-northeast track that was decidedly anti-monsoon, since it took away entire flows thanks to its domineering status in the larger Asian monsoon system of which the Indian monsoon is only a part.

The westward-bound typhoons too are disruptive to start with, but they tend to benefit the monsoon as if in an afterthought should they make it to South China Sea, past the Philippines.

Watch for 'low'

And this basin lies next door to the Bay of Bengal, which has often in the past been the repository of a remnant ‘pulse’ of a South China Sea storm that makes landfall over Vietnam, Thailand or Laos.

This ‘pulse’ can drift over adjoining Myanmar into the Bay from where it can generate as a helpful low-pressure area to boost a concurrent Indian monsoon.

Given this, it would be interesting to watch the behaviour and dynamics associated with tropical depression 09W in the northwest Pacific.

Meanwhile, India Met Department has maintained the watch for an ‘in situ’ low-pressure area to pop up in the Bay of Bengal over the next two days.

This is expected to help the monsoon make some progress over east-central and adjoining central India as well as peninsular India.

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