MET forecasts drop in min temperature

NEW DELHI: Delhi residents woke up to a chilly morning on Saturday as the minimum temperature dropped to 8.2 degrees Celsius, one notch below normal.

The maximum temperature also fell two points below the normal this time of the year at 20.7 degrees Celsius.

There was fog in the early hours with visibility at Safdarjung going down to 300m while at Palam it was 150m at 6.30am. However, Met department officials said the visibility improved thereafter.

Earlier, on Friday, the National Capital was engulfed by a monster fog, which had covered an area of more than 600,000 sq km from Pakistan in the west to Bihar in the east.

Flight operations, however, remained unaffected on Saturday due to fog, said Delhi International Airport Ltd officials. Railway officials said 47 trains were running late, 14 rescheduled and 18 cancelled due to low visibility.

On Sunday, clear sky is expected. Shallow to moderate fog is predicted in the morning hours. The maximum and minimum temperatures would be around 21 and 8 degrees Celsius respectively, Met officials said.

In terms of pollution, the Air Quality Index (AQI) on Saturday clocked 285, in “poor” levels.

According to the CPCB realtime monitoring, at 6am on Saturday, the concentrations of PM2.5 and PM10 were 133.8ug/m3 and 237.6ug/m3, respectively. The particulate matters decreased slightly throughout the day and on Saturday at 6pm the concentrations of PM2.5 and PM10 were 142.9ug/m3 and 254.9ug/m3.