Most of the country continued to witness excess rainfall during the past week, taking the overall surplus during the season starting March 1 to 105 per cent as of latest.

Thirty-one of the 36 Met subdivisions have recorded either excess or normal rainfall (as many as 27 of them excess) in what has been among the wettest March and April until now.

Westerly systems

And the rains are set to continue during the week ahead as the western disturbances emerge out of a self-imposed exile and start pushing into northwest India.

According to the US Climate Prediction Centre, the rains will pan out mostly in east and north-east India and leave a southerly trail down the trunk into peninsular north and extreme southern peninsula.

Igniting activity

In fact, part of north-east India, Kerala and adjoining south and interior Tamil Nadu are forecast to witness excess rainfall, according to this forecast.

On Thursday, India Met Department located two western disturbances lying back to back over Pakistan-Afghanistan en route to north-west India.

They will start impacting the hills as well as the plains of north-west India and east India during the days that follow.

‘Fire line’

These are expected to ignite activity along the troughs and ‘wind discontinuities,’ (where opposing wind regimes meet and create atmospheric turbulence), a normal pattern during spring-summer.

The Met has forecast thunderstorms, rain/thundershowers for mainly east and north-east India, parts of peninsular India as well as extreme South over the next four days.

On Thursday, a trough linked hills of West Bengal with north Odisha while a ‘wind discontinuity’ ran down from Telangana to Kerala across interior Karnataka.

Along with the West Bengal-north Odisha trough, this could set up the ‘fire line’ for the east-bound western disturbances to ‘light up’ the trunk of the country from east to the south in the form of thunder rolls and lightning flashes.

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