The Hindu Business Line : Rains pound Gujarat, Rann of Kutch

Thiruvananthapuram, July 2 The extreme west regions of Kutch, Saurashtra and Gujarat are receiving a severe pounding from the resident ‘low’ that chose to stay put at its overnight position over southeast Rajasthan, adjoining Rajasthan and Gujarat.

An India Meteorological Department (IMD) forecast on Monday said widespread rainfall with scattered heavy to very heavy fall and isolated extremely heavy fall was likely over Gujarat till Tuesday. Fairly widespread rainfall with isolated heavy falls is also likely over Konkan, north Madhya Maharashtra, southwest Madhya Pradesh and southeast Rajasthan.

The torrential downpour has significance for the adjoining Rann of Kutch, an extensive salt marsh straddling western India and southeast Pakistan, in that it provides the ‘lake effect’ for the low-pressure system to sustain for some time. Flooded areas provide the ambience and the required moisture for land-based ‘low’s to thrive.

DROPPING ANCHOR

The system, a remnant of tropical storm ‘04B’ (deep depression) that crossed the Orissa coast a few days ago, may drop anchor for a while, concurred the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). The predecessor ‘03B’ had slipped into the Arabian Sea, gained in strength, and had gone on to spin up as Tropical Cyclone Yemyin that hit Pakistan.

Meanwhile, clouding around the head Bay of Bengal depicted the next ‘low’ in-the-making, docking partly over land and partly over the ocean. ECMWF graphics depict the system moving north and northeast into the country’s farming heartland, bringing welcome rains into Jharkhand, parts of south Bihar and east Madhya Pradesh.

This would mean that seasonal rains would extend to those very areas, which are among the only few to return a deficit at the end of June. It would also mean that the pattern of evenly distributed rainfall would thus have been largely maintained.

JULY RAINFALL

Significantly, latest ECMWF rainfall forecasts for July-August-September suggest that peninsular India, especially the coastal regions, would continue to receive bountiful rainfall. This is in dire contrast to the ‘below-par July’ that statistical models are projecting.

Writing to Business Line, Dr Toshio Yamagata and Dr Swadhin Behera of the Tokyo-based Frontier Research Centre for Global Change (FRCGC) stated that the situation in the tropical Indian Ocean had further evolved to favour the contin uation of the positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), a monsoon-friendly phenomenon.

A positive IOD event is marked by warming anomalies in the western tropical Indian Ocean in contrast to the cooling in the east. The sea level anomalies suggest shallow thermocline in the east and deeper thermocline in the west; these are synonymous with lower heat content and higher heat content respectively.

This is also reflected in the sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies, which have started showing a dipole pattern. Anomalous south-easterlies off Sumatra will help this process further, the Japanese scientists said.

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