Rain, thunder and strong winds likely to continue

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Jakarta can expect rain, thunder and strong winds for the next few days as weather irregularities will remain, marked by a wind direction that is opposite to normal, an expert says.

"There should have been no rain in mid-April, but so far, the wind has continued blowing from the North to the South like during the rainy season," Paulus Agus Winarso, a senior expert at the Geophysics and Meteorology Agency, told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.

Normally, there is no rain in April and the wind blows from the South to the North, but what has happened is the opposite, Paulus added.

He still could not estimate when the rainy season would end due to the unpredictable weather, not only in Jakarta but also in other regions on Java.

Paulus said the weather irregularities were different from tropical storms Bonnie and Diana, which appeared last week, as the storms had already moved away from Indonesian territory.

But, the impact of the weather irregularities will be the same as during the rainy season, namely high downpours, thunder and strong winds in Jakarta over the next several days.

Experts previously said the rainy season, which caused widespread flooding in the capital in January and February would end in late March.

BMG head Gunawan Ibrahim earlier estimated the rainy season would continue until late May.

He added that a drought would come in July but would not be severe, unlike in 1997.

A searing drought stemming from the El Nino weather anomaly had hammered the corn crop and coffee trees in the country.

El Nino was a weather phenomenon caused by formation of an abnormal warm water current off the western coast of South America.