The deep depression in the Arabian Sea (05A) has spooked forecasts, with its seemingly having forefeited an overnight narrow window of opportunity to intensify and spin up as a tropical cyclone.
An India Meteorological Department (IMD) update this morning has apparently withdrawn the 'cyclone watch' and said the deep depresion would move towards Oman coast before dissipating. The system has ceased to be of any relevance to the west coast of the country.
According to the US Joint Typhoon Warning Centre, unfavourable wind shear values have caught up with 05A, which has already started weakening.
There is still no consensus on the direction which the remnant of 05A would take, with the US agency saying that it could likely track to the southwest under the twin attack of the western disturbance as also an anti-cyclonic circulation expected to build over north Arabian Sea.
Meanwhile, the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) wave, which was instrumental in churning up the Arabian Sea and fuelling the formation of 05A, is now in the process of moving into southwest Bay of Bengal and adjoining east equatorial Indian Ocean.
An MJO wave travels periodically in the upper atmosphere from west to east, and has a major role in dictating ground-level weather. The alternating wet and dry MJO phases have been known to respectively set up monsoon onsets/storm formation and intra-seasonal lull during monsoons/drought.
Early global model forecasts are suggesting that low-level easterly wave activity woud resume over the Bay of Bengal, and keep the southern peninsula variously wet over the next two-week period.