Brewing ‘low’ to drive more rain into East, Central, N-W India

The India Met Department has officially mounted a watch for a low-pressure area (‘low’), the first of the monsoon season, materialising in the Bay of Bengal over the next three days.

A preliminary cyclonic circulation is already persisting over the West-central Bay of Bengal, off Coastal Andhra Pradesh. This is expected to deepen into a ‘low’ that will help drive rains inland.

The ‘low’ will bring about an order and a sense of purpose to the monsoon thanks to its longer shelf life (than, for instance, a cyclone), leisurely movement and capacity to sustain rain for as long as it is active.

In the instant case, the India Met sees it crossing the Odisha coast and wading into Chhattisgarh and adjoining east Madhya Pradesh by July 1.

A storm tracker of the US Climate Prediction Centre expects it to continue to move along a west-northwest direction towards Rajasthan.

This is as best as it can get with regard to a ‘low’ moving inland from the Bay and tracking across the farming heartland of the country, ensuring an orderly progress of the monsoon.

It will bring rain into East and North-East India, Central India and adjoining West India (Gujarat) and North-West India during the weekend and into the next.

The Met, Indian Council of Agriculture Research and the Central Institute for Dryland Agriculture had this to say on rainfall trend during the last two weeks:

Below normal rainfall or no rain occurred over East Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Telangana, Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, Madhya Maharashtra, Vidarbha and Gujarat.

Normal or above normal rainfall occurred in Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Sub-Himalayan West Bengal, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Rayalaseema, north interior Karnataka and coastal Karnataka.

Normal or above normal rainfall occurred in either of the two weeks in Jammu & Kashmir, Haryana, Delhi, west Rajasthan, east Rajasthan, east Uttar Pradesh, west Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Gangetic West Bengal, west Madhya Pradesh, Konkan, Goa, Marathwada, coastal Andhra Pradesh, south interior Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.