It’s now turn of Mumbai-Surat to be wary of monsoon fury

The Mumbai-Surat belt could likely get a thrashing by the monsoon winds being pulled in by a well-marked low-pressure area over interior Odisha and Vidarbha.

The US National Centres for Environmental Prediction sees a heavy rain wave initially moving towards western Maharashtra during today and tomorrow.

RAIN FURY

Its intensity will scale up further as it moves further into coast on the Konkan-Mumbai belt and then gets guided to the north along the coast.

Thus it will move over Mumbai, Surat and into south Gujarat even as the ‘low’ steers itself into the north over west Madhya Pradesh.

The US agency sees most of the rain fury concentrating over the coastal belt rather than west Madhya Pradesh, though the latter would also get its share of heavy rain.

According to this forecast, Konkan-Goa and coastal Karnataka also would witness heavy to very heavy rainfall during the next couple of days.

India Met Department said the monsoon was vigorous over south interior Karnataka and Chhattisgarh yesterday.

WIDE SWATHE

Rainfall was heavy over a wide swathe of area covering Odisha, east Madhya Pradesh, Vidarbha, coastal Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, coastal Karnataka, and north interior Karnataka.

The erstwhile ‘killer low’ over northwest India has since weakened into a cyclonic circulation over Haryana and adjoining west Uttar Pradesh.

But it is still able to drop rain over many parts of northwest India due to interaction with passing western disturbances in the region.

The Met detected one such that was in the process of moving out of the region even as a successor waited its turn over the international border to the west and northwest.

NO CONSENSUS

Meanwhile, there was no consensus among weather models over the possibility of the Bay of Bengal producing another rain-bearing system.

This is even as South China Sea/west Pacific bristled with the prospects of getting activated, which are being closely watched for signs of perpetrating to the west and into the Bay.

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts saw a ‘low’ in the South China Sea heading for a landfall over southwest China coast.

This would be matched only by a powerful typhoon taking birth over the west Pacific and racing towards the south of Japan but sparing the island nation.

At least two models saw the Bay of Bengal ‘responding’ to the churn in the South China Sea but not on a scale to match the previous two systems borne out of here.

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