With Mumbaikars ready to bid the monsoon season goodbye, the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) has said that the city is likely to continue receiving normal rains rather than the thunderstorms that it has been witnessing in the evenings for the past few days.
The Met department has said that the monsoon activity is likely to continue for the next three to five days. In a first, the Met department is witnessing reactivation of the southwest monsoon at the fag end of the season. While the normal withdrawal date of the monsoon from Mumbai is September 20, the city started receiving showers again from Tuesday.
“The winds are reverting and the monsoon has surfaced again,” said V.K. Rajeev, director of weather forecast at IMD, Mumbai.
Explaining further, he said that in the last week, there was a succession of low-pressure area, which was travelling northwestwards. This would cause convective activity, which then resulted into thunderstorms in the evening and night — a characteristic indicating withdrawal phase of the monsoon.
“After a gap of more than a month, the western region — including south Gujarat and Konkan and Goa have been receiving good rainfall in the last two-three days,” said Mr Rajeev.
“The offshore trough running from the Gujarat to Karnataka coast has been strengthened. Also, there is an upper air cyclonic circulation over southwest Madhya Pradesh and adjoining areas of Gujarat region and east Rajasthan. Together, these have been causing good rainfall in the western region,” he said.
“Till the weekend at least, we expect the low pressure areas to persist. But these systems have a tendency to stagnate. They may or may not continue after three days. But till then, we can expect good showers in the region,” said Mr Rajeev.