Near-perfect IMD prediction gives teeth to govt evacuation strategy
Bhubaneswar: The India Meteorological Department (IMD)’s prediction of Cyclone Amphan’s path and intensity turned out to be flawless, making the state government’s strategy to keep evacuations lower than usual a sound one.
“The cyclone moved precisely on the path predicted by the IMD. Landfall was close to the Sundarbans as was forecast by us. We have been predicting this from the very beginning, on May 13. We had predicted wind speed of 100kmph to 110 kmph, gusting up to 125 kmph in northern Odisha. The highest wind speed recorded was 106 kmph in Paradip,” IMD DG Mrutyunjay Mohapatra said.
Rainfall and damage to property were most intense in the northern Odisha districts of Balasore, Bhadrak, Jagatsinghpur and Kendrapada, just as the IMD had predicted. While thatched roofs were blown away, many trees and electric poles were uprooted.
The cyclone — the most ferocious in the past 20 years in the Bay of Bengal — moved parallel to the Odisha coast at a distance of around 100 to 120 km between Puri and Balasore, before making landfall close to the Sundarbans as an extremely severe cyclonic storm, inflicting massive damage in the South and the North 24 Parganas, besides East and West Midnapore as was predicted by the IMD. “The eye of the cyclone moved out of the influence zone in Odisha by 2 pm. The prediction was nearly 100% accurate,” said H R Biswas, director of IMD Bhubaneswar.
Sources in the Met department said apart from analysing research-based weather models, the IMD tracks the movement of cyclones using Doppler weather radars at Visakhapatnam, Gopalpur, Paradip and Kolkata.
The IMD has been fairly accurate in past cyclone predictions, too. “The accuracy really helped us. The worst is over for Odisha. The government will estimate the damages caused by Cyclone Amphan. Restoration work has already started,” said special relief commissioner, Pradeep Kumar Jena.
For tropical cyclones in the Bay of Bengal, the IMD prediction has been near-accurate in the case of Fani (May 2019), Hudhud (October 2014) and Phailin (October 2013). However, Cyclone Titli (October 2018) had caused massive damage in certain areas in Odisha, which had taken the state by surprise.