Know the reason behind the high waves in Bay of Bengal

Bhubaneswar: The Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS), a unit of the Ministry of Earth Sciences, have issued 'swells' alerts to various States including Odisha over the last one week in view of the rise in high energy waves in the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea due to strong winds in the Atlantic Ocean.

As per official sources, these high energy waves are hitting States on eastern, western and southern coasts of India. These waves travelled thousands of miles from the South Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean and entered the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal.

These high period waves can travel long distances and become stronger as the reach. They rise up to 2-3 metres and are dangerous because they can breach the coast, reported INCOIS.

Over the last one week, several states issued a series of alerts to their fishermen. The IMD has four colour codes to denote the levels of caution. While the Red alert is considered serious and demands action by government agencies, the Orange denotes an alert to be prepared for any extreme weather event.

Similarly, the Yellow indicates that the authorities must keep a watch on the natural calamity and the Green denotes that no action should be taken and that situation is normal.

After the devastating tsunami of 2004, India developed necessary infrastructure to issue alerts in case of any abnormal wave activity in the seas.

Absence of any alert of the devastating tsunami had claimed over 2 lakh lives in India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Thailand.

(With PTI inputs)