“Continuous rainfall is not uncommon during monsoon period. However, when there is cloudburst or intense rain for long hours, it does much harm. But we all know how important rains are during monsoon,” said senior meteorologist Rajendra Shrestha. “This time we have been noticing high intensity rainfalls even in Kathmandu. In Pokhara, there was cloudburst recently and in the western region, it has wrecked havoc. But the system is moving to the eastern region now and at the same time it is getting stable,” he added.
Shrestha added that cloudbursts can be expected now rather in the eastern region. But that might be milder or of equal intensity.
In the western region, bridges, buildings, houses and large chunks of land have been swept away by the rain, rendering many homeless or missing. The metrological forecasting division (MFD) has recorded over 300 mm of rainfall in the region since Sunday night.
According to Shrestha, the cloudburst in the west is due to the interaction of the easterly and westerly winds. The easterly wind emerges from the Bay of Bengal and the westerly from the Madras and Maharashtra region of India. “And the fusion caused the burst. It has been only 5 to 6 days of the start of the monsoon. Around 90 more days are there. I feel that we will receive average rainfall this year,” he said, adding that it won´t be wrong to term the massive rain in the west in very short period as abnormal. “But that abnormality is not new though. We have seen such patterns in the recent years.”
Yet, according to another meteorologist Vidhya Ratna Shakya, one of the seven senior weather analysts at MFD, the cloud that entered from Arabian Sea became active to trigger cloudbursts in the west and the moisture or the cloud is certainly moving towards the east. “Generally, the rain would move from the east to west during monsoon. But this time, after Pokhara, it was noticed in the west and now it is coming to the east,” Shakya said. “It is raining consistently even in Kathmandu. Rain will be fair in the central region throughout the monsoon, but the cloudbursts as such are not expected here,” he forecasted.
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