Front Page

Monsoon covers about 80 per cent of country

NEW DELHI: The Southwest Monsoon has made rapid advances since Sunday and, by Monday evening, it covered almost 80 per cent of the country.

Director-General of India Meteorological Department (IMD) Ajit Tyagi told The Hindu that conditions were favourable for the monsoon’s further advance and there was every possibility of it covering the entire country in the next three days, barring a few pockets.

Asked about Delhi, which had been going through a gruelling time due to hot weather over the past several days, he said the monsoon system could arrive over the city by Wednesday.

The northern limit of the system on Monday evening stretched from Udaipur, Jaipur and Dholpur in Rajasthan to Etawah, Lucknow and Kheri in Uttar Pradesh and Dehra Dun and Uttarkashi in Uttarakhand.

In contrast, by Sunday, the northern limit only reached up to Bhuj and Baroda in Gujarat, Indore, Hoshangabad, Rajnandgaon in Madhya Pradesh, Cuttack and Balasore in Orissa, Bankura in West Bengal and Gangtok in Sikkim.

Dr. Tyagi said the current conditions and weather prediction models indicated that the present active phase could continue at least till Sunday. (The IMD can predict weather for five days only with a good level of confidence.)

Noting that the present surge was in keeping with the forecast made at a press conference by Union Science and Technology Minister Prithviraj Chavan a few days ago, IMD spokesperson B.P.Yadav said that widespread rainfall with isolated heavy to heavy falls was also likely to continue along the west coast under the influence of an off-shore trough extending from the north Konkan coast to the Kerala coast.

Satellite imageries showed convective clouds over the Arabian Sea, the south Bay of Bengal, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Bihar and low and medium clouds over Jammu and Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, east Rajasthan, Orissa, sub-Himalayan West Bengal, Sikkim and the north-eastern States.

In its long range forecast issued in April, the IMD predicted that for the season as a whole the country could get 96 per cent of the long period average plus or minus four per cent.

This was downgraded to 93 per cent plus or minus four per cent last week, following signs of possible development of the El Nino phenomenon.

In the wake of sluggish progress of the monsoon, there were apprehensions whether even the revised forecast would come true. The present surge allayed such fears.