Monsoon stuck over Sri Lanka as wind speed flags

The advance of the South-West monsoon into mainland India has been stuck at the penultimate port of call in Sri Lanka as seasonal winds failed to orient themselves and lagged in speed and vertical profile.
Winds are southwesterly just beyond the peninsular tip, tending to become westerly to the immediate north.
What prevents their further streamlining is the incursion of dry northwesterly winds from the north Arabian Sea.

RAIN IN KERALA
The southwest coast, mainly Kerala, has been witnessing widespread to scattered thundershowers over the past few days, triggered by the limited churn set up by the southwesterly, westerly and northwesterly flows in the southeast Arabian Sea.
Ideally, winds need to turn southwesterly to westerly over the southwest coast over a height of 5-6 km above mean sea level.
But half way up, the winds are still easterly over the peninsula, according to observations by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM).
The Global Forecasting System (GFS) of the Climate Prediction System of the US National Weather Services is of the view that the rains would spread along the entire west coast during the week ending May 31.
Meanwhile, the Busan, South Korea-based Asia-Pacific Climate Centre (APCC) has come out with a June-July-August precipitation forecast that jells with the ‘overall good monsoon' outlook maintained by peer models across the world.
In the operative part of the forecast published on Tuesday, the APCC said that ‘areas of above normal rainfall lie over north India, East Asia covering eastern China, Korea and southern Japan.'
This is suggestive of a possibility of the intensification of the monsoon trough over north India and Changma over the Korean peninsula, the APCC said.

The build-up in northwest India ahead of the onset of monsoon is apace with intense heating of the plains taking place to levels not seen in the immediate past. The heating helps establish the ‘heat low' over northwest India, which is a crucial meteorological parameter facilitating the orderly progress of monsoon into the mainland. The ‘heat low' sets up the pressure and temperature gradient relative to the higher values over peninsular south where the monsoon rains set in. This pressure and temperature differential drives the system to the north of the country.
An India Meteorological Department (IMD) update on Tuesday said that severe heat wave conditions were prevailing over isolated pockets of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. Heat wave conditions prevailed over most parts of the rest of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh and over many parts of Vidarbha and over isolated pockets of Punjab, Haryana, West Uttar Pradesh and Telangana.The highest maximum temperature of 48.2 deg Celsius was recorded at Kota in Rajasthan during the 24 hours ending Tuesday morning.
Satellite imagery showed convective (thundershower-causing) clouds over parts of central and southeast Bay of Bengal, Andaman Sea, Kerala and south Arabian Sea. Forecast until Friday spoke about the possibility of fairly widespread rain or thundershowers over Kerala, Lakshadweep and Andaman and Nicobar Islands while they would be scattered over coastal Karnataka.
Towards the north, a western disturbance is forecast to bring scattered rain or thundershowers over Jammu and Kashmir and isolated over Himachal Pradesh and Uttarkhand from Thursday.
Scattered dust storm or thunderstorms have been forecast also over Haryana, Delhi, Punjab, north Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.