Cyclone Biparjoy weakened early Friday, June 16 as it moved north after hitting the Indian coast, bringing strong winds and huge waves to the shores of India and Pakistan, but no casualties. not be reported immediately. More than 180,000 residents of the western Indian state of Gujarat and neighboring Pakistan have been preemptively relocated from the area Biparjoy was expected to pass through.
Less powerful than expected, the “very strong cyclonic storm” crossed the coast near the port of Jakhau (West) on Thursday evening and blew sustained winds reaching 125 km / h, before starting to lose power a few hours later . Indian forecasters expect it to calm down and become a moderate depression by Friday evening.
Hundreds of utility poles were uprooted along the coast, leading to power outages across much of the region, a Gujarat government spokesperson told Agence France-Presse. Several hundred trees were also uprooted and emergency teams struggled to access villages due to debris on the roads. No casualties were reported overnight, the office of the state relief commissioner said. More than 100,000 residents of this state had left the coastal areas to take shelter inland, according to the authorities.
In Pakistan, Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman announced that 82,000 people had been evacuated from southeastern coastal areas.
300 mm of rainfall forecast in Pakistan
On Friday morning, Ms. Rehman announced on Twitter that her country had been “largely untouched by the storm at the peak of its strength”. However, rainfall of more than 300mm is forecast for some coastal areas of Pakistan on Friday and Saturday, accompanied by storm surges of up to 2.50 meters. Shops closed early Thursday evening in the Pakistani town of Badin and the usually bustling streets emptied as night fell.
“Everyone is extremely scared,” Iqbal Mallah, a 30-year-old civil servant, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Friday. Cyclones are frequent in this region of the Indian Ocean, where tens of millions of people live. But scientists explain that these phenomena are gaining power due to global warming.
One of them, climatologist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology Roxy Mathew Koll, told AFP that cyclones draw their energy from warm waters and that surface temperatures in the Arabian Sea , also known as the Arabian Sea, were 1.2 to 1.4 degrees Celsius higher than four decades ago.
“The rapid warming of the Arabian Sea, coupled with global warming, tends to increase heat flux from the ocean to the atmosphere and promote more intense cyclones,” he summarized.
