After a delay of four days, the Southwest Monsoon set in over Kerala on Friday with rain gauge stations in all districts reporting rainfall and the wind picking up speed to drive the rainclouds up the hill areas.
All meteorological parameters signalling the establishment of steady monsoon flow over Kerala were satisfactory. The northern limit of the monsoon, which lay nearly 300 km to the south of the tip of the Indian peninsula on Thursday, moved northwards overnight to spread in a major portion of both Kerala (up to Kozhikode) and Tamil Nadu (south of Coimbatore-Cuddalore stretch), according to the India Meteorological Department (IMD).
The IMD, in its bulletin on Friday, said the conditions were favourable for the further advance of the monsoon to cover the whole of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, some parts of south Karnataka and (across the Bay of Bengal) the north-eastern States during the next two-three days.
The monsoon appeared to be on a dicey wicket in its initial phase, with the weather prediction charts showing an unpredictable system evolving over south-central Arabian Sea over the next two to seven days — a low pressure system that might develop into a stronger system like a depression or deep depression.
The IMD traces this system to move north parallel to the west coast and then move in the west-northwest direction towards the Oman coast. This could draw away from the subcontinent a substantial share of the moisture carried by the first spell of the season. However, if this system takes the northern direction parallel to the west coast, it could even speed up the advance of the monsoon over the country.
