Monsoons progress delayed by a week

People in Delhi and adjoining areas may have got a welcome relief from the searing heat in the form of unexpected rains on Wednesday afternoon....

People in Delhi and adjoining areas may have got a welcome relief from the searing heat in the form of unexpected rains on Wednesday afternoon,but it will only be a temporary respite. With the monsoon likely to remain subdued for another four days,the heat wave would continue in northern and central parts of the country for some more time.

On Wednesday,the Indian Meteorological Department said southwest monsoon activity was not likely to revive during the next week. As a result,the advance of monsoon over east,north peninsular and adjoining central India will be delayed. These areas therefore would continue to experience high temperatures,going beyond 40 degrees in certain pockets.

As of now,the southwest monsoon,which brings most of Indias annual rainfall in the four-month period of June-September,has been hovering over central and coastal Maharashtra for about a week. It hasnt progressed northward after June 7 and weather prediction models suggest it is going to remain subdued for another week.

Scientists said Mumbai,which normally starts getting monsoon showers around June 10,will have to wait for another week for rains.

Numerical predictions available from various weather centres suggest a clear revival of the monsoon would take place only around June 17. The monsoon is expected to move northward after that to cover remaining areas on the west coast,including Mumbai. Around this time,a low-pressure area is also seen to be developing in the northwest Bay of Bengal which is likely to pull the monsoon to other parts of peninsular India and eastern India such as Orissa,Chhattisgarh and parts of Jharkhand.

If everything remains normal after that,Delhi and adjoining areas might start getting monsoon rains around the normal date of June 29.

The monsoon arrived on the Kerala coast a week earlier than normal this year,but its progress since has been extremely erratic. The cyclone Aila,which had formed in the Bay of Bengal around the same time and had resulted in large-scale destruction in West Bengal,took away most of the monsoon fury.

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Scientists were hoping that Madden Julian Oscillation MJO,a wind anomaly in the equatorial region which helps in triggering the onset of monsoon and which had stayed over the Indian sub-continent much longer than usual this year,would help revive second phase of the monsoon. But that did not happen and MJO moved away to the Pacific region without doing much to the monsoon. Scientists say the revival of monsoon now depends entirely on the internal mechanism of monsoon circulation and not on any external factor.

While the showers in Delhi on Wednesday is being attributed to a western disturbance,scientists said the heat wave was likely to be back again on Thursday.