Rainfall for the country as a whole continues to be in surplus and has clocked in at three per cent as of Thursday, with more rains expected in the coming week.

The monsoon withdrawal is running behind schedule.

A stubborn low-pressure area lords it over Central India, promising heavy to very heavy rainfall also for parts of East and East-Central India as well as North-East India.

Drawing out best

India Met Department (IMD) located the 'low' over North Madhya Pradesh and adjoining South-West Uttar Pradesh, practically unchanged from its location the previous day.

The slow pace in onward movement or near-stagnation often draws the best out of the system, generating heavy rainfall from out of the intense moisture flow from both the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea.

Facilitating this is the monsoon trough that passed through Anupgarh, Alwar, the centre of the 'low' over North Madhya Pradesh, Sidhi, Chaibasa and Digha before dipping into the North-East Bay of Bengal.

Under the influence of the above systems, fairly widespread to widespread rainfall with heavy to very falls is likely to occur over Madhya Pradesh on Friday and Saturday, the IMD said.

A similar outlook is valid for Odisha, East Rajasthan, Gujarat, Assam, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh on Friday. Centre’s recording heavy rainfall (in cm) during the 24 hours ending on Thursday morning is as follows. Dwarka-20; Hoshangabad-16; Sagar and Jharsiguda-13 each; Tiruttani and Bulsar-11 each; Sundargarh and Jamshedpur-10 each; Porbandar and Diamond Harbour-9 each; Narsinghpur-8 and Kochi-7.

Deficit sub division

Meanwhile, the monsoon has lived up to its unpredictable pattern of spatial distribution, leaving parts of North-West India and adjoining East and North-East India (mostly along the hills) with varying deficit.

Among these are the Met subdivisions of Uttarakhand, Chandigarh, Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Bengal, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura.

Of these, Haryana-Delhi-Chandigarh topped the deficit chart with a cumulative 40 per cent, while West Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand ran up a distant second rank with 29 per cent each.

There is not much scope for improvement in these figures before the season ends officially on September 30, although weather models have hinted at another wave of rainfall across parts of these regions next week.

It would also depend on the withdrawal schedule of the monsoon, which too can drop varying amounts of rainfall along an arc from North-West to Central to South-West across the landscape.

Already, the Climate Prediction Centre of the US National Weather Service has predicted 'road blocks' on the way of the withdrawing monsoon being put by prospective wet events along the East Coast.

The North Tamil Nadu and adjoining South Coastal Andhra Pradesh coast as well as the Odisha coast would in stages see these events rolling out in phases, according to the US model.

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