Met Dept puts out cyclone watch in Arabian Sea

The India Meteorological Department has declared a cyclone watch in the Arabian Sea as a well-marked low-pressure area in the South-East awaited calibration into a monsoon depression by Friday.

There is emerging unanimity in model projections that the depression could spin up into a powerful cyclone and approach the Oman coast, but only just.

What the cyclone would do is pause briefly menacingly off Oman, only to take a U-turn over the north-east Arabian Sea and take aim towards the south-west Gujarat coast.

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts was the first to suggest this track, picked up later by the Global Forecast System of the US National Centres for Environmental Prediction.

They are now being joined by a bevy of other models suggesting that a powerful cyclone could strike the Jamnagar-Porbandar-Amreli-Bhavnagar-Bharuch-Surat belt around October 29-30.

The European Centre sees the anticipated arrival of the western disturbance, transiting the Arabian Gulf en route to India, as the game-changer.

It would stop the cyclone on its track, scoop it up, and fix it to its underbelly in a mid-air operation over mid-northeast Arabian Sea.

The caravan would keep moving east, and it will be a matter of time before the cyclone touches ground and erupts in a landfall over Gujarat.

It is not as if India Met Department is not aware. The wind field profile projections associated with the cyclone as depicted by it suggests a similar track for the cyclone.

The Met too has factored in the arrival of the western disturbance, which would use the ‘long handle’ to bring the cyclonic system under its control.

Once this happens, the cyclone can move only where the westerly system would take it. It is east-bound towards India, and hence the possibility of the cyclone being yanked towards Gujarat, the nearest coast.

But the Met shows the cyclone still embedded within the western disturbance by October30, and lying over the northeast Arabian Sea, equidistant from Oman and Gujarat coasts.

Meanwhile, parts of coastal and south Tamil Nadu and adjoining Kerala have received heavy to very heavy rainfall during the 24 hours ending on Thursday morning.

The south-west Bay of Bengal off the Sri Lanka coast has come to life thanks to the presence of an upper air cyclonic circulation.

Satellite pictures in the evening showed that convective (rain-generating) clouds had massed up along the Kerala coast as well as Chennai and Nagapattinam on the Tamil Nadu coast.