E-Paper
Rain brings relief for city, causes waterlogging
New Delhi
New Delhi
Rain lashed most parts of the national capital on Sunday with Delhi Ridge area receiving the maximum rainfall. The showers, accompanied by gusty winds, brought some much needed reprieve from the long hot spell that gripped the city.
The Delhi Ridge area received 56.8mm of rainfall. Safdarjung Observatory, which is taken as a representative of Delhi’s weather, recorded 23mm rainfall.
Other weather stations, such as Palam got 32.6mm, Lodhi Road received 21.2mm while Aya Nagar recorded 20mm of rain.
“The rainfall received in all these stations is categorised as moderate. Since it occurred late afternoon, its impact on bringing down day temperature will be reflected on Sunday. The rainfall was triggered by a trough in the easterlies accompanied with moisture incursion from the Arabian Sea,” said Kuldeep Srivastava, regional weather forecasting centre (RWFC), India Meteorological Department.
The trough was at a height of 1.5km-3.1km above sea level and has triggered heavy rainfall in northern plains including parts of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, he said.
Meteorologists have predicted thunder, lightning with light rain over the weekend. So far, Delhi has been reeling under high discomfort because of rising heat index. Heat index combines temperature and relative humidity to determine how hot you actually feel at a particular time.
On Saturday, maximum temperature was 35.2 degrees Celsius while minimum settled at 26.3 degrees C, both a notch above normal.
Delhi traffic police officials said that the rain resulted in waterlogging in some of the city’s arterial roads. Complaints of waterlogging was reported from NH-8 towards Dwarka, Majnu ka Tila footover bridge towards Wazirabad flyover, Tis Hazari court gate number-one towards Boulevard Road, Barfkhana Chowk, Old Delhi railway station towards Chatta Rail, around Hanuman Setu and at Kashmere Gate, Gol Dak Khana towards Kashmere Gate and Dhaula Kuan towards Gurugram.
“We deployed additional staff whereever there was need for traffic management. To manage traffic better, we switched off some of traffic signals and directed traffic manually as per requirement,” a senior traffic police official said.
