By IANS,
New Delhi : People in Delhi woke up to another rainy morning Thursday as the weather gods continued to wrap the capital with pleasant weather, bringing the mercury down to a cool 22.5 degrees Celsius, four degrees below normal.
This was the fifth consecutive day when Delhiites began their day with a welcome cup of tea. College students, who are enjoying the summer vacations, seemed to be having a whale of time.
“Actually, it doesn’t feel like a May day. It was quite chilly this morning and I didn’t feel like going to office. So, I called up two of my friends and went to a restaurant in CP for lunch. Then we walked around the Central Park enjoying the light drizzle,” said Diti Roy who works for a cultural foundation in Central Delhi.
While some took time off to enjoy the freakish weather when it is mid-summer, hundreds of office-goers had to face the wrath of traffic snarls at many places in the city and adjacent areas because of waterlogging. Commuters remained stranded for hours during the rush hour and reached their workplace late.
On Thursday between 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., the Met Department recorded 10 mm rain in Delhi. This caused a huge dip in daytime temperatures. The maximum temperature in the capital was 29 degrees Celsius, 11 degrees below what is normal for this time of the season.
“There will be a cloudy sky with possibilities of rainfall and thunderstorm in some parts of Delhi Thursday and the following day too,” said a Met department official.
The wet weather was caused by two mini-cyclones, one over Rajasthan and adjoining areas of Pakistan, and the other over Himachal Pradesh and northern Haryana, the Met Office said. It added that a trough of low pressure area over east Arabian Sea extending along the Maharashtra-Kerala coast has also contributed to the wet conditions.
The cyclonic condition in those areas will remain active until Thursday, and would cause heavy rainfall and squall in Haryana, Delhi, Chandigarh, Uttarakhand, western Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Sikkim, the weatherman said.
The Met Office has forecast wet and windy conditions till Friday in these places. There is also possibility of hailstorms, which may ruin the mango crop that has already been affected by the wet weather.
According to the weatherman, the first monsoon wind has reached western and southern India and under its influence the current heat wave in Andhra Pradesh is likely to abate by the weekend.
The following were the maximum and minimum temperatures and rainfall figure in major cities for the 24 hours till Thursday evening, with figures in brackets denoting deviations from the average:
City Maximum Temperature Minimum Temperature Rainfall
(C) (C) (mm)
New Delhi 29.0 (-11) 22.5 (-4) 10.0
Mumbai 34.5 (+2) 28.7 (+3) Nil
Chennai 36.7 (-1) 27.7 (0) Nil
Kolkata 37.1 (+1) 27.2 (0) Nil
Bangalore 32.4 (0) 20.7 (0) Nil
Bhopal 39.4 (-1) 27.5 (+1) Nil
Bhubaneshwar 37.4 (-1) 25.1 (-2) Nil
Chandigarh 28.6 (0) 22.6 (0) 8.0
Dehradun 27.7 (-8) 19.9 (-1) 0.5
Goa 34.1 (+1) 26.0 (0) Nil
Guwahati 33.3 (+2) 22.6 (0) Nil
Hyderabad 38.2 (0) 23.6 (-2) 0.1
Jaipur 36.5 (-3) 25.0 (-1) Nil
Lucknow 31.0 (-9) 23.9 (-1) 39.0
Nagpur 42.3 (0) 27.6 (0) Nil
Patna 34.9 (-4) 25.3 (-1) Trace
Pune 36.5 (0) 24.2 (+1) Nil
Srinagar 27.8 (0) 16.8 (0) Nil
Thiruvananthapuram 33.5 (+2) 25.2 (0) Nil