Conditions are becoming favourable for the onset of monsoon over Kerala latest by Wednesday, India Meteorological Department (IMD) has said.
Ahead of this, IMD expects the rains to advance into parts of southeast Arabian Sea, the Maldives, the Comorin area and southwest Bay of Bengal by Monday.
RAIN CLOUDS
Satellite pictures on Sunday showed convective (rain-bearing) clouds rising over southeast and central Arabian Se and east-central and northeast Bay of Bengal.
The IMD has predicted piloting rains to lash many places over Lakshadweep, Kerala, coastal and interior Karnataka and Tamil Nadu during the next two days. It has warned of heavy rains at one or two places over sub-Himalayan West Bengal and the rest of the northeast in what appears to suggest onset of rains there as well.
The monsoon has been stuck across Colombo for the past week.
PACIFIC TYPHOON
It now appears typhoon ‘Mawar' in northwest Pacific will help drag the system to making an onset over the Kerala coast.
The typhoon is peaking to category-3 strength on the Saffir-Simpson scale of storm intensity from today. It will start weakening only from early Tuesday morning.
By this time, the typhoon, travelling in a north-northeast direction, would pull in the larger monsoon current across the equator into southeast Arabian Sea. In the process, the current would get slotted in just right for making the onset over Kerala coast.
LIMITED PURPOSE
‘Mawar' had switched on the monsoon over the Philippine archipelago before re-curving and tracking towards north-northeast into central Pacific.
Being the dominant weather system in the tropics, ‘Mawar' has the capacity to carry the larger monsoon along with it.
But the typhoon is beneficial only for the limited purpose of precipitating the onset, since the flows would continue to be attracted to it until it dies out south of Japan.
This is not expected to happen until June 8/9, only after which the rains would pick up in strength over mainland India.