Strong winds and cloud cover have brought heavy rainfall over Port Blair and Car Nicobar stations in Andaman Nicobar islands since Friday morning. (Representational Image)
Monsoon is expected to arrive over the Kerala coast on May 29, three days ahead of its normal schedule of June 1, according to the India Meteorological Department (IMD). “The southwest monsoon is expected to set in over Kerala on May 29, 2018 with a model error of plus/minus 4 days,” the IMD said in a statement on Friday. Strong winds and cloud cover have brought heavy rainfall over Port Blair and Car Nicobar stations in Andaman Nicobar islands since Friday morning. Met officials have forecast that rainfall is likely to intensify in the coming days.
“Considering all model outputs and global atmospheric conditions, we expect monsoon to arrive around May 29 over Kerala. However, conditions are becoming favourable for monsoon winds to gain strength over the Andaman Sea in the coming days,” said A D Tathe, director, Regional Meteorological Centre, Nagpur.
Usually, monsoon arrives and advances over Andaman Sea around May 20 and progresses over the southeast Bay of Bengal. Last year, monsoon had covered this region by the second week of May with continued progress towards the mainland. However, the Bay of Bengal branch of the monsoon had strengthened, bringing rains first over the east coast and central India regions. IMD officials are also expecting the monsoon to make swift progress over remaining parts of the country after its onset over the Indian mainland. The Met department has forecast all India rainfall ranging to 97 per cent of Long Range Forecast this year.
The IMD has been issuing such alerts since 2005 using “an indigenously developed state of the art statistical model with a model error of ± 4 days”. According to the El Nino Southern Oscillation bulletin for May, neutral conditions will continue to prevail over the Pacific Ocean until the end of this month. But negative phase of the Indian Ocean Dipole is expected to set in during the monsoon and it is later expected to return to neutral phase starting October.
However, for the past fortnight, Kerala and Lakshadweep have been receiving good rains and this activity is most likely to continue.