The India Met Department has said that an anticipated low-pressure area would materialise over south-east Bay of Bengal by Tuesday.
This is at least three days behind schedule and farther than where the ‘low’ was originally thought to develop, thanks mainly to the disruptive presence of an evolving super typhoon in west Pacific. The newly-formed typhoon, Nuri, off the Philippines, is forecast to become a dangerous category-5 typhoon with peak winds speeding to 250 km/hr and gusting to 305 km/hr over next five days. Category-5 represents class-topping attributes on the Saffir-Simpson scale for storm intensity. Fortunately, Nuri is seen raging for the most part of its life in the vast Pacific waters only.It would track a north-northeast track away from the Philippines sparing Japan a direct hit before fading out by Thursday, global models indicated. Nuri’s destructive power will play out upstream in the North-East monsoon corridor, affecting the best-laid plans that downstream Bay may have been readying.
But Nuri would have forced a change in the location of the ‘low’ in the Bay, now expected to be much farther from the Tamil Nadu coast than earlier thought.
Models are now veering down to the coordinates closer to the Sumatra Island, to the south-southwest of the Andaman Sea for the anticipated ‘low.’
This is more or less what India Met is suggesting now. Its inferred projections favour a scenario where the ‘low’ grows to become a tropical cyclone and hitting India’s east coast by the weekend.
The area of landfall suggested varies from the north Tamil Nadu to Andhra Pradesh coasts, as an odd forecaster suspects, even the Odisha coasts. The wide disparity has been brought about the change in the location of origin of the ‘low’ forced by the would-be super typhoon. A few models suggest that a break-away circulation from the building cyclone would wriggle its way towards the Myanmar coast.Meanwhile, parts of Tamil Nadu has been receiving moderate to isolated heavy rain thanks to the presence of a trough along the coast topped up by a cyclonic churn in the upper levels.