'Low' weakens as Met points to successor brewing in the Bay of Bengal

The well-marked low-pressure area off the Kerala and Karnataka coasts has weakened this afternoon into conventional ‘low’ over the same region.

This has brought down the intensity of rainfall over the south peninsula from overnight yesterday which had set off floods at a number of places.

In another significant development, India Met Department has put out a watch of a fresh ‘low’ in the west-central Bay of Bengal off the Andhra Pradesh coast.

This system is expected to materialise by Thursday, the Met said, something which had been already reported in these columns.

Peninsular India will likely come under another spell of heavy to very heavy spell of rain from Andhra Pradesh into the interior and the west coast.

Early available forecasts indicated that the system might strengthen over land as it approaches the Konkan-Mumbai coast towards the end of the week.

On alert

Also this afternoon, the Met put on alert the western parts of the peninsula for sustained heavy to heavy rainfall from the prevailing ‘low.’

The warning is valid for the next couple of days for Konkan-Goa; coastal, south interior and north interior Karnataka; Madhya Maharashtra; and Marathawada.

Meanwhile, the monsoon deficit for the country stands at 18 per cent for the country as a whole despite the rain surge in the South.

A welcome change is the conversion of Marathawada from ‘rain-scanty’ (deficit ranging from 60- to 99 per cent) to ‘rain-deficient’ (20- to 59 per cent) category.

That leaves Punjab (63 per cent) and Haryana-Chandigarh-Delhi (64 per cent) as the only ‘rain-scanty’ Met subdivisions as the monsoon readies to withdraw from the northwest as it runs into the last of the four-month season.

The 13 ‘rain-deficient’ subdivisions left now are Jammu & Kashmir; Himachal Pradesh; west Uttar Pradesh; east Uttar Pradesh; east Madhya Pradesh; Saurashtra and Kutch; Gujarat; Vidarbha; Marathawada; Telangana; Rayalaseema; and coastal Andhra Pradesh.

The monsoon could well have ended its run over northwest India bar the shouting. But rains are due for central and adjoining peninsular India during this week too.