City gets respite from cold, temperatures to rise from Friday

Gurugram got a respite from the ongoing cold wave on Friday, with Gurugram recording a maximum daytime temperature of 18.4°C, up from the season’s low of 13.1°C

Gurugram got a respite from the ongoing cold wave on Friday, with Gurugram recording a maximum daytime temperature of 18.4°C, up from the season’s low of 13.1°C the previous day.

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The minimum temperature was 4°C, the same as Thursday, with yet another episode of shallow to moderate fog in parts of the city during the early hours.

As per the India Meteorological Department’s seven day forecast for the city, the minimum nighttime temperature is expected to rise to as much as 7 degrees Celsius by December 24, while the maximum daytime temperature is expected to touch as much as 22 degrees Celsius in the next week. Foggy and misty mornings are expected to continue, with partly cloudy skies during the daytime.

Air quality in the city also improved slightly, with 224 (poor air) on the CPCB’s AQI bulletin (down from 246 on Thursday), which experts attributed to high speed winds which touched up to 15kmph in some parts of the city. “We would have seen an even further decline in pollution, but since the winds themselves are cold there has not been much vertical diffusion of pollutants on Friday,” said Sachin Panwar, a city-based independent air quality expert.

As per the early air quality warning system for Delhi-NCR, “Air quality is likely to start deteriorating marginally from 18.12.2020 but remain largely in lower end of Very Poor category.” Experts said this was due to a possible slowing down of wind speeds, which will once again lead to an accumulation of pollutants closer to the earth’s surface.