A passenger waits outside Secunderabad station after trains were cancelled on Thursday. (AFP)

New Delhi, May 21: The fury in the atmosphere that had acquired the title of cyclone Laila today decayed into a depression, losing its energy and its name, lumbering northward along the eastern coastline at a slow 12kmph.

The wind speeds associated with the depression have dropped to about 45kmph from the 90kmph winds when the cyclone had crossed the Andhra Pradesh coast on Thursday near Machlipatnam, India Meteorological Department scientists said.

“Laila is gone,” said Mrutyunjay Mahapatra, the director of the cyclone warning division at the IMD, New Delhi. “When wind speeds drop to 34 knots (60kmph), the system is no longer a cyclone, it is a deep depression, and it loses its name.”

“It’s now moving over land and we expect it to weaken even further,” Mahapatra told The Telegraph. (At around noon today, the depression was centred over coastal Andhra Pradesh about 100km west of Kakinada.)

The depression is expected to cause heavy (64 mm) to very heavy (above 124 mm) rainfall over parts of coastal Orissa during the next 36 hours and heavy rainfall over parts of south Bengal over the next 48 hours, the IMD said this afternoon.

A senior official said the IMD has issued advisories through state authorities for fishermen to be cautious when venturing into the sea along the coasts of Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, and Bengal.

Computer simulations of the atmosphere have suggested the possibility that the depression may recurve eastward over the Bay of Bengal — and again intensify, drawing on moisture from the sea.

But cyclone trackers believe the system has lost so much energy over the past 24 hours that the possibility of its re-emergence as a cyclonic storm is remote. “The longer a cyclone travels over the sea, the stronger it can get,” Mahapatra said.

Even if this system drifts back over the sea, it will emerge over the northern Bay of Bengal. This is a relatively shallow zone (compared to the southern Bay), and the distance it can travel before striking land is also shorter, Mahapatra said.

Under international conventions for naming storms, cyclones are named, depressions or deep depressions are not. Cyclone names in the northern Indian Ocean region are picked sequentially from a list provided by eight countries.

Laila was in the list pitched by Pakistan. The next cyclone in the Arabian Sea or the Bay of Bengal will be named Bandu from Sri Lanka’s list.