Heavy rain forecast for next 3 days in Uttarakhand

NEW DELHI: The weather office on Monday forecast heavy to very heavy rainfall over the next three days over some parts of Uttarakhand, which is still recovering from a deluge last week that is feared to have taken over 1,000 lives.

"Heavy to very heavy rainfall, of up to 25 cm, would occur at one or two places over Uttarakhand during the next 72 hours," the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said in its forecast update this afternoon.

An IMD handbook on Weather Terminologies "one or two places" refers to isolated rainfall with less than 25 per cent of weather stations experiencing the rains as forecast.

However, an IMD spokesman said the rainfall would not be as severe as of June 17, which triggered flash floods in the mountainous state and left a trail of death and destruction.

In its forecast issued this morning, the weather office warned of "severe" rainfall for Uttarakhand for three days beginning today.

It has updated the warning to "very severe" in the forecast issued in the afternoon.

The weather office has also forecast heavy rainfall at one or two places over Sub-Himalayan West Bengal and Sikkim, Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Tripura, north coastal Andhra Pradesh, coastal Karnataka and Kerala.

It has also forecast heavy to very heavy rainfall at one or two places over Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Vidarbha and Telangana.

Till yesterday, Uttarakhand had received 392 mm rainfall as against the normal of 104.2 mm, which is 275 per cent excess.

For country as a whole, rainfall till yesterday was 148.2 mm as against the normal of 110.8 mm, which is 34 per cent more than normal.