Chennai has recorded historic rains in the space of just 36 hours as Cyclone Michaung

treaded slowly past its coast. The city as a whole received around 45 centimetres of rain
between Sunday and Monday night.
Research based consulting initiative shows that El Nino indices (Nino 3.4) have crossed 2°C
for the first time since February 2016, after the super El Nino of 2015.Secondly.mjo
(Madden–Julian Oscillation) was in phase 3 which favours Chennai historically. These factors
made system to form in Bay of Bengal.
The reason for system to hit Chennai is due to strong Arabian ridge. If any system or low
forms in the bay we have consider three factors: Arabian ridge, pacific ridge and western
trough. Before a week many models including GFS predicted pacific ridge to be strong and
the system moves to Bangladesh but that was not the case.
ECMCF was accurate here as it showed system is nearing north TN coast. As the days past,
members of GFS also changed its track towards north TN and south AP and expected it to
cross between ongole and Machillipatnam.
When the system starts forming, strong easterlies surge was towards Chennai on 29 th of
November and many places recorded 150mm to 200mm of rainfall this actually made land
saturated as we already saw 500mm of rainfall in daily quantum in November.
Already the nature of Chennai soil is clay type so water is not absorbed much as other
places, due to high saturation water is not at all absorbed during cyclone.
Till December 3 all models found difficult and finally short range king GFS came up with
consistent carnage stuff rainfall over KTCC. It predicted 600 mm of rainfall in just two days
around Chennai and so red alert was declared by IMD.

The reason for this heavy rainfall:

Stronger cyclones like Vardha , Gaja gave less rainfall than this . The reason for this is the
cyclone had dense western quadrant which fell over Chennai and also cyclone movement
was very slow. The reason for this is the force of Arabian ridge and pacific ridge was literally
equal so, cyclone starts stalling over Chennai. Stalling is nothing but rotating, as cyclone
rotates after strong western band its south-western bands also fell over Chennai which
bloomed like anything. Around 7-8 pm on Monday intense rainfall happened in core and
north Chennai. Nugapakkam rr maintain at 50-60mm/hr for more than two hours which
resulted in network cut all over Chennai and weather found very difficult to track further.
Amount of rainfall:
450 mm to 500 mm of rainfall in 36 hrs and avadi coming up with whopping rainfall of
564mm.
This cause historical flooding in Chennai as chembarambakkam, puzal lakes saw high inflow
and was already fill due to past November rains. Hence, lot of water were released which
caused flooding in coovam river.
Most importantly, if there is cyclone, sea cannot intake water from river so, water level
continuously rises in the river. Already Chennai is just 6m from sea level. If we compare with
other metropolitan Mumbai 14m, Kolkata 9 m it is relatively so all water flows to low lying
areas.