Overall monsoon situation improved marginally better with rain deficit reducing to 42 per cent as on Thursday against 48 per cent a week ago.

Just one meteorological subdivision (out of 36 in all) recorded excess rainfall, but the region happens to be a far-flung group of islands in extreme southeast Bay of Bengal – the Andaman and Nicobar.

Deficient rain

Seven subdivisions recorded ‘normal’ (-19 per cent to +19 per cent); but even here, only two fell on the positive side.

At least 21 fell in the ‘deficient’ category (-20 per cent to -59 per cent) and seven in the ‘scanty’ (-60 to -99 per cent).

Deficient and scanty regions mostly filled the rainfall map of the country. To the South, only Lakshadweep, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, south interior Karnataka and Rayalaseema, are in the ‘normal.’

Over the rest of the country, the list of ‘normal’ was confined to just Haryana, east Madhya Pradesh and the Himalayan foothills of West Bengal.

A low-pressure area that sprung up over Bangladesh, and which has moved into West Bengal lately, may have improved conditions over the East and the West Coast during the past couple of days. The India Met Department observed that monsoon has since advance into entire Telangana and north interior Karnataka; most of Marathwada; and more parts of Madhya Maharashtra, Vidarbha and east Madhya Pradesh.

As on Friday, the northern limit of the monsoon passed through Veraval, Surat, Nashik, Wasim, Damoh and Sultanpur.

Apart from the heavy to very rain over North-East and adjoining east India, the winds fanned by the ‘low’ along a trough extending to the North-West have sparked thunderstorms all along.

Thunderstorms roll

These thunderstorms stalked an entire swathe extending from Jammu and Kashmir during the 24 hours ending on Friday morning.

These included Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Delhi, Rajasthan, east Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Gangetic West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura.

Goa and coastal Karnataka on the West Coast and coastal Andhra Pradesh also received thundershowers under the pull of monsoon flows by the ‘low.’ Outlook for the next two days indicated that heavy to very rainfall would continue over North-East and adjoining east India and along the West Coast, especially coastal Karnataka and Kerala.

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