‘Depression’ off Gujarat strengthens monsoon

In a sudden development, the Arabian Sea to the west of Porbandar, Gujarat, has thrown up a low-pressure that in turn intensified into a depression, strengthening the monsoon along the West Coast of India.

The India Met Department said that the depression was located 530 km to the west of Porbandar on Monday.

But the system is forecast to move away from the West Coast, and poses no threat to any part of India, except that it will intensify rain over the region.

The depression is forecast to intensify into a deep depression as it moves towards the Oman coast, India Met said.

It has also caused the offshore trough, a narrow corridor of low pressure off the West Coast that determines the health of the monsoon, to lie extended from Gujarat to North Kerala.

The trough had until now been manifest between Coastal Karnataka to Kerala, a conventional alignment that represents normal monsoon conditions.

The extended offshore trough means that full-blown monsoon conditions are to be expected along this stretch even as central and southern parts of Kerala stay relatively dry.

During the 24 hours ending Monday morning, heavy to very rainfall has been reported from Ratnagiri, Harnai, Honavar, Mormugao and Karwar on the West Coast.

To the other side of the Indian peninsula, another low-pressure area is lurking in the Bay of Bengal off the coast of South Odisha and North Andhra Pradesh.

It has been instrumental in setting off a punishing rain spell in East and adjoining Central India over the past couple of days.

Heavy rain has been reported from Jalpaiguri, Cuttack, Bhubaneshwar, and a number of other places over West Bengal, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh.

The sudden development in the Arabian Sea has dimmed the prospects of intensification of the counterpart in Bay for now.

This is because no two weather systems which form part of the same monsoon can together intensify at the same point of time except under exceptional circumstances.

Meanwhile, the low-pressure area in the Bay is likely to move inland and track into Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana taking advantage of a corridor set up by a land-based trough.

According to projections by the Met, a follow-up low-pressure area is expected to form in the Bay of Bengal, which would help sustain the monsoon over North India.

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts too agrees, saying that the impending ‘low’ is likely to form by July 1. It goes on to add that a third ‘low’ can be expected by July 8.

This is an outlook shared by the storm tracker featured by the US Climate Prediction Centre, which suspects that the whole of July could turn out to be ‘productive’ in terms of rain-heads moving in from the Bay.