Met says it may rain from today as city continues to sweat at 38°C
Rain and thunderstorms are likely to hit Delhi from Tuesday night, Met officials predicted on Monday.
The showers are expected to continue intermittently till Thursday afternoon. This would in turn bring down the mercury level by at least five degrees, Met experts claimed.
“We are expecting some rain and thundershowers in DelhiNCR from Tuesday night onwards. The activity would pick up pace on Wednesday,” said a senior official of the Regional Weather Forecasting Centre.
This means that Delhites would have to bear with another hot and humid day before they can expect some relief.
“The maximum temperature touched 38 degrees on Monday. It is likely to hover around 36-37 degrees Celsius on Tuesday too. Once the rain hits, the mercury is expected to drop,” said the official.
If predictions of the Met department hold true, then the temperature could drop to around 32 degrees on Wednesday.
Even though monsoon had hit Delhi on July 2, the city has hardly received any rain since then, except on July 7. Even then, the rain was highly sporadic.
While Safdarjung area received around 17mm of rain, the ridge and Ayanagar area received less than 10 mm.
Since July 2 – when monsoon officially hit the city — Delhi has received around 22.8mm of rain. Most of this rain was registered on July 7 (17.6 mm), while the remaining days remained almost dry.
“This time however we are expecting some widespread rain activity, as a system has developed that might churn out rain from the clouds,” he added.
A trough – which is actually an elongated area of low pressure – was hovering near the Himalayan foothills. That is expected to come down south near Delhi-NCR and trigger rain. This apart a cyclonic circulation over east Uttar Pradesh would be also adding to the effect and trigger rain.
Usually Delhi receives the maximum rain in three months – July, August and September. But this year it received around 191.9 mm of rain in June – nearly 2.5 times of what it gets in that month.
This was the wettest June in more than a decade.
Later on Monday night, Delhi received light rain.
The shower lasted for around 10 minutes. Met officials said that it is mainly because of some local clouds which develop due to intense heat and humidity.