Monday’s well-marked low-pressure has weakened twice over but not before bringing the whole of East India, adjoining Central India and most parts of North-West India under a fresh wet spell on Tuesday.

The interior parts of Peninsular India and most parts of the West Coast, too, saw thundershowers breaking out as easterlies from the Bay of Bengal and westerlies from the Arabian Sea brought the rain clouds in.

Both these ‘arms’ of the monsoon converged over parts of North-West India to generate moderate to heavy rain over West Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and the neighbourhood, as well as over Uttarakahand.

The India Met Department (IMD) expects a successor low-pressure area to take shape over the North Bay in three days and sustain the rains over East and North-East India.

This goes to substantiate a forecast put out by an ensemble mode of the US National Weather Services a week ago, which sees even more development in the Bay, going forward. The IMD, too, seems to endorse this outlook.

The upshot is that the process of withdrawal of the monsoon from extreme West Rajasthan, which normally begins on September 1, is likely to be delayed.

The delayed withdrawal process has in the recent past culminated in the monsoon rains spilling into early October.

Meanwhile, the IMD has forecast heavy rain tomorrow (August 29) over West Uttar Pradesh, East Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Vidarbha, Chhattisgarh, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, East Gujarat, Madhya Maharashtra and Konkan and Goa.

An extended outlook for September 2 to 4 said that widespread rainfall with isolated heavy falls is likely over the North-Eastern States, East India and parts of Central and North-West India.

Scattered to fairly widespread rainfall activity is likely over the rest of the country, except Jammu & Kashmir, West Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh, Delhi and parts of South Peninsula, where the rainfall activity is likely to be isolated.

Deficit status

Meanwhile, the all-India rain deficit thus far for the season has been reduced to 6 per cent with Rayalaseema (-44 per cent) and Lakshadweep (-43 per cent each) topping the chart.

Token deficits persist over Jharkhand and Haryana, Chandigarh, and Delhi (-25 per cent each) and Bihar (-20 per cent) though Jharkhand has perpetually witnessed a shortfall so far during the season.

North Interior Karnataka (-20 per cent) and Saurashtra & Kutch (-22 per cent each), too, are in deficit, though they fleetingly migrate into the ‘normal’ category at times.

As in the case of Lakshadweep, the North-Eastern States, too, have featured a perennial deficit through the season with the hills of Bengal and Sikkim (-20 per cent) and Nagaland-Manipur-Mizoram-Tripura (-21 per cent) featuring the lowest.

Some of the deficits, especially in the East and North-East, may improve with another couple of rain-generating lows likely developing in the Bay during the first week of September.

 

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