The southwest monsoon has got stuck yet again soon after extricating itself out of a 15-day-long hold-up over West and Central India.
The system has failed to advance after a low-pressure area forming in the Northwest Bay of Bengal helped it break the jinx three days ago, bringing it with hopes of rain into the parched West and Northwest India.
But these hopes have been belied with the latest logjam attributed to the presence of a raging typhoon Neoguri in Northwest Pacific.
Being the most prominent weather feature in the larger Asian monsoon system, Neoguri is pulling away monsoon flows along the India’s West Coast, southern peninsula and adjoining South Bay into the Pacific.
In fact, Neoguri is fast ramping up into a class-topping Category-5 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale for storm intensity featuring very strong winds speeding to beyond 250 km/hr.
SUPER TYPHOON
The storm has already reached Category-4 strength (very severe cyclone) will ratchet up to Category-5 (super cyclone) strength tomorrow.
Neoguri will skirt the Southeast China coast and head straight towards South of Fukuoka in southern Japan, according to typhoon trackers.
It will keep the Category-5 status unchanged for another day before weakening to Category-4 and hitting South Japan on Wednesday. It would rapidly weaken later to Category-1 strength and to a tropical storm.
The Indian monsoon is likely to remain a mute witness to the ferocity of the dangerous North Pacific typhoon until it makes a landfall over South Japan on Wednesday.
‘LOW’ WEAKENS
Back home, India Met Department said this morning that the monsoon-driving ‘low’ over East Uttar Pradesh is already weakening and will become ‘less marked’ during the next 24 hours.
This is because both moisture feed and by extension supportive wind speeds along the trough that links the Bay with Punjab is weakening in view of the ‘pull power’ of typhoon Neoguri.
Satellite pictures showed that thunderclouds were drifting along the West Coast and a wide corridor across interior peninsula and Central India into West Uttar Pradesh.