NEW DELHI: The national capital and its neighbouring areas are expected to receive heavy rainfall on Wednesday. The IMDsounded an orange alert in the city for the next two days. The India Meteorological Department (IMD), has warned of heavy to very heavy rainfall with thunderstorm and lightning at isolated places. This could lead to disruption of traffic due to flooding of roads, waterlogging in low-lying areas and disruption of municipal services like water and electricity.
“Delhi-NCR is very likely to experience moderate rain with one or two spells of heavy rainfall (more than 65mm) during evening of July 29-30,” according to the Delhi’s Regional Weather Forecasting Centre. The monsoon trough which was responsible for heavy rainfall last week as well continues to play the important factor this time as well.
“Currently monsoon trough is running close to foothills of Himalaya. From the evening of July 28, monsoon trough i.e. line of low pressure would shift southwards and continue to pass very close to Delhi-NCR, during evening of July 28 to July 30,” said Kuldeep Srivastava, head of IMD’s regional forecasting centre Adding to the trough, there is south-westerly winds from the Arabian sea and easterly winds from the Bay of Bengal that will reach Haryana, Delhi- NCR, western Uttar Pradesh and north-east Rajasthan on Tuesday night. Srivastava noted that under the influence of these systems, heavy to very heavy rainfall would also occur over these areas.
According to IMD’s, Safdarjung observatory, which provides representative figures for the city, recorded a rainfall of 226.8 mm in July. There were 12 rainy days this month. The observatory had recorded the all-time wettest July in 2003 when it recorded the rainfall of 632.2 mm.
On Tuesday, while weather was dry over Delhi, rain and thundershowers occurred at many places over Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, at a few places over Jammu & Kashmir, Ladakh, Gilgit-Baltistan, Muzaffarabad and Uttar Pradesh and at isolated places over Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan, as per IMD. The maximum and minimum temperature on Tuesday will hover around 37 and 28.7 degrees Celsius but will drop to 35 and 26 degrees Celsius on Wednesday, and 33 and 25 degrees Celsius on Thursday.