Thursday turned out to be one very good day of thunderstorms over Tamil Nadu, though Chennai completely missed out, with the Salem IMD observatory recording 9 cms of rains up to 5:30 AM in the morning. The IMD observatories at Trichy, Pondicherry, Athirampattinam also recorded between 3 to 5 cms of rains during the same period while places like Tondi, Nagappattinam, Karaikal & Cuddalore recorded around 2 cms of rains.
With atmospheric conditions perfectly placed thunderstorms are likely to continue over Tamil Nadu today as well. Interestingly in what could be a game changer today, the trough line is seen extending between the two circulations on either side of Peninsular India. The first one off the Gujarat coast which was a remnant of the earlier LPA that travelled across Peninsular India over the past few days & the second one now lying as an Upper Air Cyclonic Circulation off the coast of North TN / South AP and could go on to become the next LPA in a couple of days time.
Weather models indicate wind convergence at multiple levels over the southern parts of Peninsular India which is possibly due to circulation prevailing at multiple levels. This is likely to provide the right conditions for thunderstorms to develop & sustain later in the afternoon / evening over many parts of Tamil Nadu. As has been the case for the past couple of days one can expect thunderstorms to start popping up around the broken Eastern Ghats by early afternoon and with better steering wind compared to the past couple of days the chance for North Coastal Tamil Nadu places looks bright with today falling under near perfect environment.
With the extended trough line between the two circulations likely to behave like a Joker in the pack it may not be ambitious to expect a few places along the coast to witness extremely intense thunderstorms similar to some of the ground strikes which touched 150 kA yesterday. The area about 50 kms either side of Mahabalipuram could be the stretch to watch out for these intense thunderstorm activity though it is fair to expect Chennai & Suburbs to catch up a good spell of rains later today.