As a well-marked low-pressure awaits further traction in the South-West Arabian Sea, things seem to be happening over the Bay of Bengal, too, with clouds spreading out fast over the region.

Live satellite pictures on Monday evening showed clouds massing from around Sri Lanka into South-West and West-Central Bay before tapering out into the deltaic region of Myanmar.

All these geographies are expecting the monsoon to set in one after the other, with helpful systems apparently in the making even in the face of repeated ‘provocations’ from the rampaging Arabian Sea.

Awaiting onset

Twin cyclones in those waters are enough to disorient the monsoon flows, but the Bay is seemingly holding its own, managing to create a safe corridor of its own to pull in the flows from across the Equator. These flows are forecast to converge and set up a low-pressure area even as the powerful Arabian Sea cyclone erupts in a landfall over the Yemen-Oman coasts over the next five days.

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts indicates that this ‘low’ would brew closer to Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh and careen away in a North-North-East direction to Bangladesh andMyanmar.

No model consensus

The ensemble model of the US National Centres for Environmental Prediction says it would instead wash over the Tamil Nadu-Andhra Pradesh coast, and likely send a remnant across the peninsula into the Arabian Sea.

It would in turn get some traction, before moving away from India’s coast. But the peninsular region, including the normally rain shadow-Tamil Nadu, could receive good precipitation during this period.

According to the US model forecast, the peninsular seas would remain in an animated state until June 6/7 thanks to the extended influence of a helpful Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) wave in the higher levels of the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, the cyclone brewing in the Arabian Sea is to be named in Maldivian, ‘Mekunu,’ is forecast to travel North.

Depression today

The India Met Department (IMD) expects the prevailing well-marked ‘low’ to become a depression on Tuesday and grow into a full-blown cyclone two days hence and head towards South Oman-North Yemen coast. Among the model forecasts surveyed, the UK Met model alone showed the cyclone to become a class-topping category-5 super cyclone, eyeing the Central Oman coast around Ras Madrakah.

The US Navy Global Environment Model sees a less intense storm while the National Centres for Environmental Prediction says the powerful cyclone may weaken just ahead of landfall.

Most others models favoured a scenario where a conventional cyclone, at worst a category-1 cyclone, hitting the central region of the Oman coast, but without giving exact timelines.