Zeenews Bureau
New Delhi: Delhiites woke up to a foggy morning on Monday which has led to cancellation/delay of number of flights and trains.
The mercury hovered around 5 degree Celsius while sun was nowhere to be seen even as the day progressed prompting motorists to resort to the use of fog lights to
negotiate through streets in the capital during the chilly
morning.
Visibility dropped below 50 metres and to almost zero in
Palam area while it was around 200 metres at Safdurjung, the
Meteorological Department said.
Around 40 trains that arrive early morning are running late, while atleast 4 trains have been cancelled.
Flight operations at the Indira Gandhi International Airport were also disrupted with eights flights on the delayed list.
As per the Met department, fog would persist for the next 48 hours with visibility below-100m visibility. However, the haze would ensure that the temperature will go up a bit, the Met said.
The mercury has shown a downward trend in the past couple
of days, with both the maximum and minimum dropping. The
coldest day of the season so far was December 16 when minimum
dropped to 4.7 degree Celsius and maximum to 21.7 degrees.
In December last year, the minimum had come down to 5.2
degrees Celsius on the 22nd of the month. In the past decade,
the lowest minimum for the month was recorded on December 12,
2005 when the mercury recorded 3.3 degrees Celsius while the
highest maximum was 28.4 degrees on December 15, 2003.
The record for the lowest minimum for the month of
December is 1.1 degree Celsius recorded on the 26th of the
month in 1945 and the highest maximum was 29.3 degrees on
third of the month in 1987.
Cold wave has intensified in other parts of North India as well with over 60 deaths being reported from Uttar Pradesh. People in Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Haryana and Uttarakhand are also fighting the chill.
Fog had descended over large parts of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bangladesh on December 6 and now it has spread to the northern areas. As per reports, this year’s spell may turn out to the longest spell of fog over the Indo-Gangetic plains in December since 1998, when it lasted from December 7 to 28.
With PTI inputs
