Cyclone Amphan Begins Landfall In Bengal, Heavy Rain Along Coast

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This May 17, 2020, satellite image released by NASA shows Cyclone Amphan over the Bay of Bengal in India. Amphan has intensified into a super cyclone and expected to make a landfall near Sundarbans, south of Kolkata, on Tuesday evening, May 19, 2020. A red alert has been initiated to sea bound fishermen and disaster management teams started evacuating villagers from the sea front. (NASA Worldview, Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) via AP)

Cyclone Amphan, one of the worst storms over the Bay of Bengal in years, has started making landfall. “The landfall process began at 2:30 pm and will continue for about four hours. The forward sector of the wall cloud region is entering into land in West Bengal,” the Director of India Meteorological Department or IMD Bhubaneswar told news agency ANI. Amphan weakened from a super cyclone to an “extremely severe cyclonic storm” on Tuesday, causing strong winds and heavy rain in parts of Odisha and Bengal as it advanced towards the Indian coast. This afternoon, the storm lay centered over northwest Bay of Bengal, just 95 km from West Bengal’s Digha town before it started making landfall.