The season of tropical cyclone (TC) activity over the Indian ocean has already began. This fact has a strong impact on the weather conditions over southern Africa (SAF), as some of these low pressure systems navigate towards SAF, causing excess floods and severe disasters.
Such is the case of the TC “Chalane”, currently located over the Mozambique channel (Fig. 1).
Figure 1: Warning issued by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center at 28/0600Z. Source: https://www.metoc.navy.mil/jtwc/jtwc.html
It's projected track is estimated to make landfall over Mozambique at 30/12 and then proceed westwards, entering Zimbabwe at 31/12 (Fig. 2).
Figure 2: Projected track of tropical cyclone “Chalane”. Source: https://reliefweb.int/map/mozambique/tropical-cyclone-chalane-warning-n8-28-december-2020
The strong convective activity is already evident over the region where the TC is identified (Fig. 3), with strong cyclonic winds re-curving around the low pressure region (Fig. 4).
Figure 3: Infra+ imagery with pseudo-colours for cloud top temperatures <-33oC, indicative of deep convection at 28/12/2020. Map taken from Windy.
Figure 4: Wind speed at 800 hPa and surface pressure contours at 28/12/2020. Map taken from Windy.
We note that the forecasted rain accumulation over the next 24 hours according to ECMWF is estimated to reach 1m, hence, there should be extreme caution on 30/12 when "Chalane" is expected to make landfall over Mozambique.
Figure 5: Rain accumulation over the next 24hrs according to ECMWF. Map taken from Windy.