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The India Met Department (IMD) has sounded an alert about a fresh low-pressure area materialising over the South Andaman Sea by Saturday, which could intensify as a depression the very next day.
Coming close on the heels of cyclone ‘Nada,’ the latest churn in the Andaman Sea/Bay of Bengal could spin up a successor storm many times stronger, some global models suggest.
India Met, too, has plotted a track for the storm across the Bay of Bengal, allowing an extended stay over the waters for it to intensify.
Initial forecasts indicate a track along almost a straight line in the west-north-west direction pointing to the Andhra Pradesh coast and landfall by December 8 or 9.
None of the models accessed suggested any marked weakening of the storm at any time during its journey towards the coast.
But this outlook could change any time since the intervening week is a long time for the ocean and the atmosphere to create a hostile environment to undermine the storm.
The Canadian Meteorological Centre was the odd man out among the agencies that saw the system picking a track that almost resembled that of cyclone ‘Nada.’ It saw the system racing towards the South of Chennai and weakening a round before making landfall by December 9, a day later than what others suggest.
The Global Forecast System of the US National Centres for Environmental Prediction and the US Naval Global Environmental Model suspect that the storm may pack considerable strength.
Both assess that the storm may start peaking early and reach an ‘inflection point’ by December 7 (Monday), sustaining the intensity until landfall the next day.
The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts said that the storm might reach the central part of the Andhra Pradesh coast by December 11.
Meanwhile, the IMD has come out with a long-range forecast for the cold weather season (December 2016 to February 2017).
Warmer-than-normal maximum and minimum temperatures (warmer days and nights) are likely in all of India’s meteorological sub-divisions.
The warmest temperature anomalies are likely to be featured in a majority of the subdivisions in North-West and North-East India.
The averaged mean land surface air temperature in 2016 until October was significantly above normal. The year 2016 is likely to end up as one of the warmest years since 1901, the IMD said.
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