In this interesting journey of how monsoon unfolds, we first saw there are two types of monsoon rains that India witnesses. South-west monsoon and north-east monsoon. In this, the SW monsoon is more important and as we saw in the last post, it arrives from the southwest direction and near the Indian landmass, bifurcates into two branches: the Arabian Sea branch and the Bay of Bengal branch. It is the same southwest monsoon winds, just that first travels over the Arabian Sea while the second over Bay of Bengal.

The Arabian Sea branch of the SW monsoon first hits the western ghats at Kerala and then moves northwards providing rain to the coastal areas along the Western Ghats. The Bay of Bengal branch flows over the Bay of Bengal to head towards North-Eastern states of India. It covers the entire Eastern Himalayas and gives rain to the North-East Indian states, Bangladesh and West Bengal.

The Arabian Sea branch of the monsoon is quite stronger than the Bay of Bengal side monsoon.

In most years, the advance of monsoon is not day-on-day, not smooth but actually ‘fast progress and a break’ pattern. For instance, for almost four days now, the conditions are not favourable for monsoon advance towards Delhi.

The advance process is not smooth but is punctuated by IMD officers tell us that there is fast propagation for 3-5 days and then stops for a week or so to progress in steps along the West Coast, Peninsular India, Central India, NE India, Indo-Gangetic plain and finally reaching the borders of West Rajasthan.

The image shows how much has the monsoon advanced as on June 19. Tomorrow we will see how much time this journey takes.

---- to be continued