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Along with the onset of monsoon over Kerala on Tuesday, the Bay of Bengal also erupted into activity after a prevailing well-marked low-pressure area intensified into a depression.
The India Met Department (IMD) located it to 170 km West-South-West of Kyaukpyu and 190 km South-South-West of Sittwe in Myanmar.
It is forecast to rapidly become a deep depression, just short of cyclone.
Landfall by night
This would move North-North-East and cross Myanmar and adjoining Bangladesh coasts between Kyaukpyu and Teknaf (Bangladesh) close to Sittwe by Tuesday night itself.
While not significant for India, this depression helps to put the Bay into the ‘monsoon mode’. Model forecasts indicate further churn being initiated in its trail to help propel the rains into the East Coast and adjoining hinterland later this week and into next.
Flows to pick up
The unintended casualty could be the prevailing well-marked ‘low’ over South-East Arabian Sea off North Kerala-Karnataka that largely helped anchor the onset of the monsoon over Kerala. Despite this, the monsoon flows are expected to pick up from around June 4, and this would largely have to do with the animated phase that the Bay would have entered by then.
This phase brims with the prospects of an elaborate ‘low’ or depression taking shape in the Bay and crossing the Andhra Pradesh coast, bringing the monsoon into East-Central and adjoining Central India.
It would also pull in fresh monsoon flows across the South Peninsula, bringing the rains again to those areas where the initial rain ‘pulse’ may have started to fade out.
An ensemble model by the US National Centres for Environmental Prediction says that over the next 10 to 12 days, the Bay would lob in another system from the Odisha-Bengal coast that would move right into the West over land.
Spread of rains
The likely ‘low’ would push into Central India and West India, navigating through Chhattisgarh, East Madhya Pradesh, and West Madhya Pradesh before ending up over Gujarat.
Whether it has enough traction to penetrate Saurashtra-Kutch or not, it would, in any case, have brought rain over East-Central, Central and West India.
Meanwhile, the IMD has forecast squally winds of 50 km/hr and gusting to 60 km/hr off Kerala, Karnataka, South Maharashtra, Goa and Lakshadweep on Wednesday due to the well-marked ‘low’ in the vicinity.
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