You might think that the month of February has offered a lot of surprises when it comes to weather, right from bright mornings to cold breezy evenings and a short spell of rains in the middle. But experts say that the pleasant weather is neither unusual nor will it last for long.
The month itself did not witness a same pattern of weather. While the temperature dropped almost four degrees from normal at the beginning of February, it slowly shot up in subsequent days.
“We cannot say that it is a prolonged winter. We have checked with our previous year’s records and it is not severe. If you look at February 4 to 10, there was a drop in temperature of up to four degrees from normal, but not after that,” said YEA Raj, Deputy Director General, Meteorological Department.
He pointed out two simple reasons – one due to the lack of cloud formation and radiation from sunlight escaping back to the atmosphere leading to drop in temperature and two, due to advectional cooling, that is, cold breeze flowing from surrounding places. For example, Chennai can get such breezes from places like Tiruthani and Tirupathi.
However, weather bloggers reasoned that it the bad monsoon that led to the prevailing dry weather in the city.
Nevertheless, Chennaiiites will not enjoy this pleasantness for long. While MET department officials said the mercury will shoot up in March, avid bloggers predict it could start by the end of February itself.
“In the last two or three days, there has been a cloud cover and it usually gets hot when there are clouds,” blogger Shiva, explained in simple terms.
Of course, rains, which happened due to the lack of uniformity in wind flow, is neither frequent in the month of February nor is it a usual weather condition.Weather experts also warn Chennaiites to gear themselves for summer. “It is too premature to talk about summer. But summer in Chennai is reliable. For that matter, Indian summers are reliable,” the DDG said.
However, being located along the coast, Chennaiites can take look forward to sea breeze especially during the month of May when the summer heat gets unbearable.
“Summer will be terrible but there might be an evening rain or thunderstorms due to the onset of Southwest monsoons,” said another blogger Senthil Kumar.