The emerging wet session from the monsoon on retreat is being bankrolled by an intense typhoon-in-making in northwest Pacific and initially seen hunkering down towards southeast China.
The building storm is merely waiting for predecessor ‘Fung-Wong’ that has hit the same region of China to finish formalities and sign off quietly into the East China Sea off Hangzhou and Shanghai.
The European Centre for Medium-Term Weather Forecasts indicates that the successor storm has already taken shape off Guam.
The US Joint Typhoon Warning Centre also has put out a cyclone (typhoon) formation warning.
The European Centre expects the system to intensify rapidly and become a very strong typhoon, achieving peak strength just off Taiwan and southeast China coasts by the week-end.
Both these coasts would come directly under the fury of the typhoon, which is then forecast to rebound towards South Korea and later to Japan.
It is around this time that the monsoon flows in the Arabian Sea and southwest Bay of Bengal get sufficiently churned up and converge into a circulation around peninsular tip of India and Sri Lanka.
Circulation forms
India Met Department said this morning that a preparatory circulation has already formed over Lakshadweep-Maldives-Comorin area.
It could descend to lower heights and move in east-southeast towards Sri Lanka and adjoining southwest Bay of Bengal.
It would send in easterly winds across the peninsula in a pattern associated with the northeast monsoon and cause moderate to heavy showers over the south peninsula from the week-end.
Parts of the southern peninsula have already started receiving passing showers over the past couple of days from a deep trough extending from the low-pressure area over east India.
Rain in East
These rains will get better organised with the formation of the circulation over south peninsula and Sri Lanka from the week-end.
In fact, the ‘low’ in the east has precipitated so much rain over the past couple of days that the overall monsoon deficit has come down by a full percentage point to 11 per cent.
Assam and Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, and Sub-Himalayan West Bengal have turned into ‘normal’ category of recorded rainfall during the season until yesterday.
But Nagaland-Mizoram-Manipur-Tripura is still nursing a considerable deficit, with exactly one week to go before the season formally comes to an end.