Heavy rain for the East as ‘low’ washes over Odisha coast

The well-marked low-pressure area that washed over the Odisha coast has brought heavy to very rain over the State during the last 24 hours ending on Monday morning.

Thunderstorms lashed parts of the East Coast extending from Andhra Pradesh into Gangetic West Bengal as also inland over Bihar and Assam.

Stations recording very heavy rainfall (in cm) include Kalingapatnam (23); Balasore (21); Contai (16); and Bhubaneshwar, Digha and Cuttack (14 each).

The rain-driving system will spin towards east-northeast and weaken over the next couple of days but will bring heavy rain into east and north-east India.

In the North-West, dust storms and thunderstorms are forecast to roll out across Rajasthan, Punjab, Delhi and west Uttar Pradesh as a causative western disturbance holds sway.

Meanwhile, over south-east Arabian Sea, winds are converging around what is being billed as an ill-timed and misdirected whirl that could upend the prospects for a normal onset of monsoon over Kerala.

The system is forecast to pull away from the Kerala coast out into south-central Arabian Sea and further away over the next few days.

Tokyo-based Regional Institute for Global Change under Jamstec, the Japanese national forecaster, has said in an update that El Nino in Pacific could be accompanied by a negative Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD).

In a negative phase of the IOD, eastern basin of Indian Ocean warms up relative to the west, and is considered a bad augury for the Indian monsoon.

But the Institute added a caveat saying that it needed more confirmation of the event actually materialising since there was disparity in forecasts by other agencies.

The maritime continent in Asia (Indonesia etc) and India will see drier conditions in summer and autumn owing to the El Nino, it said.

Most parts of Europe, Africa, West Asia, Russia, India, South-East Asia and western US will experience warmer conditions.

In contrast, eastern China, central-eastern US, and Japan will see cooler summer.

In the southern hemisphere, a colder winter is forecast for Australia while it will be warmer in Africa and South America.

A warmer autumn is forecast for most parts of Europe, Africa, West Asia, India, South-East Asia and China.

But most parts of the US, eastern Russia and southern Canada are in for a colder times during the season.