Cyclone Arnab kills three and inundates cropland in eastern India

India’s weakest southwest monsoon since 2015 preceded Arnab’s landfall

Cyclone Arnab made landfall Wednesday in eastern India with powerful winds and heavy rain, killing three people and inundating roughly 200,000 acres of cropland, authorities said. Electricity poles were uprooted and roads were blocked. As the storm’s wind speeds weakened, heavy rainfall became the greatest threat to areas inland. Full damage estimates were likely to take days or weeks to calculate.

Meteorologists’ findings on Arnab’s intensity

Unusually high temperatures across the Bay of Bengal, an already warm atmosphere and heat stored below the surface helped fuel Arnab, according to K.J. Ramesh, a former director general of the Indian Meteorological Department. “A warmer atmosphere can also hold more moisture, increasing the potential for intense rainfall,” he said.

Akshay Deoras, a weather expert at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, said the unusually warm waters helped Arnab strengthen rapidly. He said cyclones are part of natural weather patterns, but warming from human-caused climate change can amplify their rainfall.

The storm followed India’s weakest southwest monsoon since 2015. A strong El Niño weather phenomenon combined with an already warming climate resulted in sparse rainfall from June through September, according to weather experts. Districts across several Indian states declared droughts, and southern and eastern India suffered particularly large rainfall deficits. Heavy rain offered little reassurance when it fell unevenly because it could run off hardened, dry ground rather than being absorbed.

Deoras said forecasting had improved for large weather systems, but local thunderstorms and flash floods remained difficult to predict, leaving dangerous gaps in protection.

Data-center risk findings from XDI and Prakash

The cyclone’s arrival came on a coastline with billions of dollars being invested in data centers. Climate experts said the arrival underscored threats to existing livelihoods and infrastructure intended to drive future growth as extreme weather becomes more frequent. Visakhapatnam, in the path of Arnab’s heavy rains, is where Google, Adani and Airtel plan to invest $15 billion for a hyperscale data center.

A 2025 assessment by climate-risk analytics firm XDI examined 228 Indian data centers and projected that more than one in 10 would face high risks of damage from climate change by 2050 under a high-emissions scenario. The analysis also showed that structural adaptations could substantially reduce damage risks.

Anjal Prakash, a public policy professor at Flame University in Pune, India, said data centers face overlapping threats from flooding, heat, unreliable electricity and water scarcity. He said planning based on historical weather can underestimate how climate change is increasing extreme weather.

Prakash said infrastructure planning must account for future climate conditions, including strengthening electricity grids, flood-proofing roads and housing and improving crop insurance. He said businesses also need continuity plans that consider several failures occurring together, such as a cyclone followed by power cuts and transport disruption.

Wider economic losses and adaptation priorities

Prakash said heat waves reduce the productivity of factory and outdoor workers, while floods and cyclones interrupt transport, electricity and logistics. He said those indirect costs are easily overlooked in early assessments focused on damaged crops, homes and roads.

“Households often bear the earliest and harshest losses through damaged homes, destroyed assets and lost wages,” Prakash said. He said many farmers, informal workers and small enterprises lack insurance or savings, making it harder to recover losses. Governments then face reconstruction bills that can squeeze investment in schools, healthcare, transport and industrial capacity, he said.

Past extreme weather had already imposed heavy costs on India. In 2025 alone, the country experienced extreme weather on 360 days, with 4,421 people killed and 17.41 million hectares (43.21 million acres) of cropland affected, according to the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment. India is among the top 10 most vulnerable countries to climate impacts and suffered $170 billion in losses from 1995 to 2024, the latest period for which data was available, according to Germanwatch’s Climate Risk Index.

Extreme weather has also imposed costs across South Asia. Pakistan’s 2022 floods killed more than 1,730 people and caused more than $30 billion in damage and economic losses, according to a government-led assessment. The Nepal floods in August this year are estimated to have caused more than $4 billion in damage and thousands of deaths.

“The biggest blind spot is the cascading disruptions,” Prakash said. A flooded road or damaged substation can interrupt factories, supply chains and services far beyond the disaster zone, he said.

Prakash said India and its South Asian neighbors should seek predictable, grant-based adaptation finance and simpler access to United Nations loss and damage funding at the upcoming global climate talks in Turkey next month. “Climate finance must reach the frontline communities before losses become irreversible,” he said.