Clouds over Indian Ocean hold promise of rain

This is the link to my story with my colleague Basheer in The Hindu on 16.3.2010:
http://www.hindu.com/2010/03/16/stories/2010031662860500.htm

The text is as follows:


(Picture caption: Topsy-turvy:Children of a seaside hamlet in the State show how to beat the heat. Temperatures have been hovering close to record levels for the past couple of weeks.)

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Indications are in favour of a couple of evening showers in many parts of Kerala towards the second half of this week, provided the volatile interplay of all known and unknown factors that govern the weather systems behave to expectations.

Responding to a question whether there would be any rain soon over the State, P.V. Joseph, former Director of India Meteorological Department (IMD), said on Monday that a long band of clouds had formed stretching over a length of nearly 1,000 kilometres over the Indian Ocean, some 500 km to the south of the Indian Peninsula.

The normal tendency of this cloud band would be to move north. It might come gliding slowly, bringing a couple of showers over Kerala in another two or three days. Do not expect them to be anything more than light evening showers; yet these showers could bring down the temperatures over the State for a while. The summer would stretch ahead, he told The Hindu.

Speaking of the unusually hot weather at the beginning of this summer, Dr. Joseph, an internationally reputable climate expert, said one need not search for its reasons beyond the simple reality of global warming. The summer of 2009 had been the hottest of last 100 years in the country. The months of January and February this year brought hardly any rain over Kerala. In March, the State usually got a couple of widespread showers. That too was confined to a few pockets in the State this time.

K. Santhosh, Director of the Thiruvananthapuram meteorology centre, said the wind-flow pattern over the peninsula so far this month had not been the usual one for this time of the season. Usually, moist north-westerly winds from the direction of the Arabian Sea would meet with southerly or south-easterly winds from the Indian Ocean around this time of the year, forming a trough extending from interior Karnataka to the tip of the peninsula. This would cause clouding and a few thundershowers, keeping a bridle on the temperatures.

This time, there had been stronger northerly/north-easterly dry winds pressing down the warm land mass along the eastern flank of the peninsula, overpowering the flow of the south-easterly winds from the Indian Ocean and thus preventing the latter's interaction with the north-westerly winds for the formation of the usual north-south trough along the peninsula.

The dry northerly/north-easterly winds dominating the overall wind systems over the peninsula was one reason for the higher than usual temperatures in Kerala so far in March this time.

Temperatures so far this month have not crossed the “highest-ever recorded” (as was being reported in some sections of the media) in any place in the State, according to data maintained at the meteorology centre here.

The highest recorded so far this month was 39.4 degrees Celsius in Punalur on March 3. The highest-ever recorded for the centre was 40.6 degrees Celsius on March 29, 1992 and March 31, 1983.

However, the first 15 days of March in Kerala had been, on the whole, hotter than March of 2009.

In 10 of the 11 main temperature recording stations of the IMD, maximum daytime temperatures this March have exceeded last year's by between 0.1 degrees Celsius and 1.8 degrees Celsius.

In Palakkad, where the Revenue Department recorded a maximum temperature of 42 degrees Celsius on a certain day this month, the IMD's temperature recording facility is temporarily non-functional.

*****