Bay lobs in fresh ‘low’ to guide monsoon rain into central parts

A low-pressure area has formed over the north-west Bay of Bengal off the West Bengal-Odisha coasts promising to rev up the monsoon over east and adjoining central India and the peninsula.

The West Coast will be another major beneficiary, with an elongated trough lying flat out off the coast from Gujarat coast to Kerala.

Rarely during this monsoon has this important monsoon facilitator come closer to its true self as it did on Friday signalling an active phase along the coast and in the adjoining central and peninsular India.

The fresh ‘low’ has also brought round a counterpart land-based trough over north-west and east India to switch back to its truncated alignment; the best it has managed thus far this season.

Ideally, it should link Sriganganagar/Barmer in west Rajasthan with the centre of the low-pressure area in Bay of Bengal through Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Gangetic West Bengal.

Even in its truncated state, the trough was able to deliver a first round of moderately successful showers over Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Delhi, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh.

Had it aligned itself to its usual position, Rajasthan, Gujarat and west Madhya Pradesh too would have got rain through interaction of monsoon winds with itinerant western disturbances passing through Rajasthan and Jammu and Kashmir.

It remains to be seen how far the ‘low’ gets to put the land-based trough to shape but initial indications suggest that a wave of rain is in order for central India followed by adjoining north and north-west India.

A significant feature about it this time is that the rains would variously cover parts of the parched west Madhya Pradesh, even managing to filter into Gujarat.

The Met Department said on Friday that conditions were favourable for the monsoon to enter parts of Gujarat over the next two days.

The trough ran down from the northern parts of Punjab as far down to the south-southeast as the north Andaman Sea across Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Odisha and the centre of the ‘low.’