Winter is Here: Yellow Alert in Delhi as Mercury Dips Below 4 Degrees, Light X'mas Rains May Add to Chill

Temperature dipped below four degrees Celsius in Delhi on Monday as the national capital and its nearby regions shiver under a cold wave. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) said that though Safdarjung, Delhi’s base station, recorded a temperature of 4.4 degrees on Monday morning, it plunged to 5.8 degrees at Palam and 3.1 degrees at Lodhi Road. The minimum temperature recorded at 8:30am was 3.2°C.

The weather department issued a yellow alert for the national capital both for Sunday and Monday. RK Jenamani, Director General of Meteorology at IMD, further said that there is a possibility of drizzling on December 24 or 25.

The IMD has several colour-coded warnings depicting the weather at a particular place. The warnings are issued after analysis of weather forecast data for a particular region over a few days.

Yellow weather warning indicates severely bad weather. It also suggests that the weather could change for the worse, causing disruption in day-to-day activities and asks people in an area to remain vigilant.

The cold wave swept Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, Gilgit-Baltistan and Muzaffarabad, Uttarakhand, Amritsar, Chandigarh, and Himachal Pradesh. The IMD has predicted that cold wave to severe cold wave conditions are very likely to continue in northwest India over the next three days. Dense fog is predicted in a few regions of Uttarakhand, Punjab and Haryana over the next two days. Severe cold swept Punjab and Haryana early on Sunday, with Amritsar reeling at a minimum temperature of -0.5 degrees Celsius. Chandigarh recorded a low of 3.2°C. In Haryana, Sirsa was the coldest place recording a low of 0.6°C.

Meanwhile, Delhi on Sunday recorded a maximum temperature of 19.2 degrees Celsius, three notches below normal, while the minimum was logged at 4.6 degrees Celsius, the season’s lowest so far. News agency PTI reported, the relative humidity oscillated between 39 per cent and 85 per cent. The weather office has predicted mainly clear skies with shallow fog on Monday morning and cold wave conditions at isolated places across the national capital. The minimum and the maximum temperatures are likely to settle around four degrees Celsius and 19 degrees Celsius respectively on Monday, it said.

IMD also predicted cold wave conditions with a drop in mercury level in Kanpur as well, where the minimum and maximum temperatures is expected to be around 5 degrees Celsius and 19 degrees Celsius, respectively.

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