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 .
Unusually hot weather
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 in the last 100 years in the country.
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.
