Cyclone Biparjoy makes landfall, wind speed likely to be at 115 to 125 kmph: IMD
Cyclone Biparjoy has made landfall on Thursday touching the Saurashtra, Kutch in Gujarat, and adjoining Pakistan coasts, India Meteorological Department (IMD) has said.
The wind speed is likely to be 115 to 125 kmph gusting to 145 kmph during the landfall process, it said. According to IMD, heavy rainfall is likely to continue during the landfall process.
The landfall process may take several hours to complete, IMD said.
The meteorological department said the storm surge due to the cyclone will likely be 2-3 metres above the astronomical tide and is expected to inundate low-lying areas of Dwarka, Okha, Diu, Naliya, Veraval, Bhuj, Porbandar and Kandla. The astronomical tides in some of these districts could be up to 3-6 metres in different places, IMD said.
The landfall point is likely to be between Mandvi and Karachi near Jakhau port and the landfall process is expected to continue till midnight on Thursday. “ Landfall process takes a few hours to be completed and may continue until midnight. The region where landfall will take place doesn’t have uniform coast, it’s more like a gulf so the landfall process will take time. The size of the total system is huge, about 300 km in radius, core wind area is 100 km in radius. It is a very severe cyclone and is expected to maintain the same intensity,” said Ananda Das, in charge of cyclones at IMD.
“If u see the radar, the northern portion of the cyclone there not much rainfall is seen.
Most of the rainfall will be in the southern eyewall as mentioned earlier. This shows areas on the southern side of the centre will get more rain in next 6 hrs than areas north of the centre,” said Vineet Kumar Singh, researcher, Typhoon Research Center, Jeju National University, South Korea.
“Cyclone Biparjoy is now the longest duration cyclone in the Arabian Sea history breaking the record of the June 1998 cyclone based on data from the Joint Typhoon Warning Centre. Cyclone Biparjoy is maintaining cyclone strength (winds > 34 knots) for 192hrs (till Wednesday morning),” Singh had said on Wednesday.