The sea off India’s east coast is about to make the news, and not in a good way. A low-pressure area sitting over the Bay of Bengal is expected to grow teeth over the next five days, and the India Meteorological Department says it could come ashore as a full cyclone on the morning of October 28, somewhere between north Andhra Pradesh and south Odisha. The Bay of Bengal cyclone season has a way of announcing itself early, and this one is following the script.
Fishermen along both coasts are already being told to turn around and come home. That sentence, bland as weather-department language gets, is the real headline. Everything else is forecast. That part is already happening.
Day by day: how the Bay of Bengal cyclone builds
IMD Director General Mrutyunjay Mohapatra laid out the progression on Friday, and it reads like a countdown.
It started Friday morning, when a low-pressure area formed over the east-central and adjoining southeast Bay of Bengal. IMD’s Bhubaneswar centre recorded it still sitting over the same patch of ocean at 8:30 am.
Today, Saturday, it is likely to consolidate into a depression. The wind over the east-central Bay is already squally at 35 to 45 kmph, Mohapatra said, rising through the day to 45 to 55 kmph with gusts touching 65.
By Sunday it should be a deep depression, with winds at 55 to 65 kmph and gusts to 75. By Monday morning, IMD expects it to be a full cyclonic storm over the central Bay, winds at 70 to 80 kmph and gusts reaching 90 kmph.
Then it moves west-northwest, toward the north Andhra Pradesh and south Odisha coasts, arriving by the morning of Wednesday, October 28. The exact landfall point, Mohapatra said, will be pinned down once the system becomes a depression and the models get a proper grip on it. Forecasts get sharper as storms get closer. They also get scarier.
Odisha is already moving
The Odisha government is not waiting for the models to sharpen. On Friday it put all districts on high alert and cancelled the leaves of all government officials, PTI reported. Of Odisha’s 30 districts, 16 coastal districts are being prioritised.
After a high-level review, Revenue and Disaster Management Minister Suresh Pujari said district collectors had been told to keep contingency plans ready, and the Odisha State Disaster Management Authority has been instructed to move people out of low-lying areas, keep cyclone shelters stocked and open, and have emergency measures in place. The minister appealed to people not to panic and said the state was prepared for the worst-case scenario regardless of where the storm eventually lands.
The rainfall warnings are already specific. Most of Odisha’s districts will see heavy to very heavy rain from October 26. On October 27, a red alert stands for Puri, Ganjam and Gajapati. By October 28 and 29, IMD expects extremely heavy rainfall over the region.
Evacuations are the boring, unphotographed half of disaster management. They are also the half that keeps the death count low. Tibet got the other half of that equation this week, when an earthquake left rescuers racing freezing cold to reach villages cut off from the world.
The rain is not waiting for landfall
The storm has not formed yet and the rain is already here. IMD has forecast moderate to heavy rainfall across Tamil Nadu and Puducherry until October 26, with Chennai and its neighbourhood in line for a possible heavy downpour through the weekend. Schools were shut in many Tamil Nadu districts on Friday. Tiruchi and the delta districts were lashed on Friday evening, lightning and thunder slowing the evening peak traffic to a crawl.
Andhra Pradesh’s disaster management authority has rain on its watch list for Konaseema, West Godavari, Krishna, Guntur, Bapatla, Prakasam and the Rayalaseema districts. The Andaman Islands are under a heavy-rainfall warning until October 25.
West Bengal gets its share from October 28, the weather office said: heavy rain in the coastal and western districts, thunderstorms with 40 kmph gusts across the south Bengal districts, and a two-to-three-notch drop in day temperatures. Fishermen there have been told to stay off the sea from October 26.
October’s rain has already cancelled one headline event this month, when it washed out the India-West Indies T20I decider in Bengaluru and left the five-match series shared 2-2.
Why October, why Odisha
Here is the part worth sitting with. October is Odisha’s cyclone month; Titli in October 2018 is the recent precedent, and the state’s disaster machinery is practically rehearsed for this script. That rehearsal is the real story behind the cancelled leaves and the open shelters.
And there is a bigger backdrop. A study published in Mausam, IMD’s own peer-reviewed journal, and made public on Friday, found that over the past 70 years large parts of northern India have shifted hotter and drier, while peninsular India has become wetter. The dry zone that once ended in western Uttar Pradesh now reaches into the east of the state. A wetter peninsula is the stage storms like this one keep walking onto. This is the season the Bay of Bengal cyclone is built for.
The forecast is unusually specific five days out, and that is exactly what gives two states time to move people, stock shelters and clear the sea. Whether the storm follows the script is the part nobody controls.
Somewhere off the coast tonight the wind is already at 40 kmph and climbing, and the sea does not do rehearsals. Wednesday morning will tell us whether this is a scare or a storm. The coasts, to their credit, are not waiting to find out.