The Hindu Business Line : Monsoon may reach Andaman Sea by Friday

The mainland will not be covered under this spell, and would have to wait until the Arabian Sea arm makes its tryst with the Kerala coast around June 1.

Thiruvananthapuram , May 14

Favourable conditions are building up for the onset of the southwest monsoon over the South Andaman Sea and South Bay of Bengal by Thursday/Friday ahead of the normal onset date of May 20.

Model predictions indicate the lower level wind flow gradually gaining in strength with matching moisture content, which will combine to trigger persistent rainfall activity over the region beginning from Thursday.

Dr Akhilesh Gupta of the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) told Business Line that Typhoon Chanchu currently blowing in the Western Pacific might just have hastened the Bay of Bengal arm of monsoon into negotiating the home stretch.

Models show the respective flows feeding the monsoon and the typhoon dragging each other into a coupling mode from Tuesday onwards, but the linkage has not become clear yet. Flows associated with Typhoon Chanchu, intensifying fast into a super typhoon as it heads into the South China Sea, are strong enough to influence the evolving weather over the Bay.

There is a corresponding amplification of the westerly flows precipitating cloudiness over Western Arabian Sea. This is seen propagating further into the west, and will help bolster the flows over Bay of Bengal with wind speeds clocking 20 kmph initially before spurting to 40 kmph.

Moisture incursion will take place in tandem, only to be accentuated by a fresh feed from the southern hemisphere. The cumulative effect of all these will be that rainfall will become widespread and grow into the east covering the South Andamans, the North Andamans and even the Myanmar region.

But the mainland will not be covered under this spell, and would have to wait until the Arabian Sea arm makes its tryst with the Kerala coast around June 1. This will be preceded by the monsoon current reaching the Sri Lanka shore by May 25.

From the look of it, this time-tested schedule is likely to be more or less kept unless some dramatic late-in-the-month turnabout disrupts it, Dr Gupta said.

Meanwhile, the monsoon driving `heat low' is yet to fall into place over Western Rajasthan/Pakistan but this can wait until sometime just prior to or after the onset of monsoon over the mainland. The pre-monsoon heating phase is still on in the region.

An NCMRWF update on Sunday said that day temperatures continued to remain above 40 deg C over the plains of Northwest India, North Gujarat, Central India, Interior Maharashtra and Interior Andhra Pradesh. Heat wave conditions continued to prevail over many parts of Rajasthan, parts of West Haryana and Northwest Madhya Pradesh, where day temperatures are still above 45 deg C. These conditions will be sustained over the next two days.

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