The rain-driving low-pressure area, midway on its westward course, was located over South Madhya Pradesh and adjoining Vidarbha this morning.

This effectively brings the associated heavy rain belt to bear down over Central India and increasingly farther west covering West Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and Konkan and Goa (including Mumbai).

SATELLITE MAP

This morning's satellite picture shows clouds gathering over Nagpur, Yavatmal, Amravati, Achalpur, Burhanpur, Jalgaon, Jalna, Aurangabad, Nandurbar, Vadodara, Bhavnagar, Bharuch, Vallabhpur, Barwala and Limdi, across Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat.

Significantly, a massive cloud bank hangs just off Mumbai-Vasai-Virar threatening to wallop the metropolis and its neghbourhood with heavy to very heavy showers.

Elsewhere, clouds drifted across central adjoining North Kerala into Coimbatore, Tirupur, Erode, Salem, Tiruvannamalai, Kanchipuram, Arakkonam and Ponneri in Tamil Nadu, just skirting Chennai.

MORE RAIN FORECAST

The India Met Department (IMD) has forecast heavy to very heavy rain in isolated places over Gujarat and Konkan and Goa today, while it will be extremely heavy over South Gujarat and North Konkan.

The rain will be heavy to very heavy for the rest of today over West Madhya Pradesh, Saurashtra and Kutch and Madhya Maharashtra; heavy over East Rajasthan, Vidarbha, Bengal, the North-Eastern States, Telengana, Karnataka and Kerala.

As for tomorrow, South Gujarat, Konkan and Goa, and Uttarakhand will be in focus for heavy to very heavy rain watch, while it will be heavy over the hills of Bengal and the North-Eastern states.

Subsequently, the heavy to very heavy rain belt is forecast to drift to the North and North-West India, with some of the areas with deficit rainfall getting covered in the process.

SUCCESSOR 'LOW'

A successor rain-producing circulation is forecast to take shape in the Bay of Bengal on Friday, which could once again set off a rain wave across Central India and into parts of North-West India.

The better part of peninsular India would also get covered if early forecasts are any indication, though the last word may not have been said yet.

HARVEY

Meanwhile, a remnant of the category-4 hurricane 'Harvey' that hit the Texas coast in the US, has edged out into the Gulf of Mexico and could bring back potentially dangerous spells of rain over land.

Already, the powerful hurricane has delivered historic amounts of rainfall in the neighbourhood, which continued to persist a couple of days after the storm made landfall.