The mercury’s downward movement continued on Friday, with Chandigarh witnessing its coldest day of the season.
At 13°C, the day temperature was nine notches below normal and just over a degree lower than that recorded the previous day.
Since this winter’s first rain on Monday, the day temperature has been declining this week. In the past five days it has plummeted by over 13°C.
Due to cloud cover, the night temperature kept rising during this period, but dipped to 10.5°C on Friday.
“For the next 24 hours, there will be slight or no change in weather,” said an official of the meteorological department’s local centre. “However, in the next two days, fog will clear and temperature will gradually increase.”
Two flights cancelled, 5 delayed
Meanwhile, fog continued to disrupt air and rail operations for the third consecutive day.
Two flights — Spicejet’s Chandigarh-Delhi and Air India’s Chandigarh-Mumbai — were called off while five flights got delayed due to low visibility.
The airport is still not equipped with modern instrument landing system (ILS) that allows flights to land on days having low visibility. It has a basic CAT-I (B) ILS that does not allow landing if the visibility drops below 1,000 metres.
{{/usCountry}}The airport is still not equipped with modern instrument landing system (ILS) that allows flights to land on days having low visibility. It has a basic CAT-I (B) ILS that does not allow landing if the visibility drops below 1,000 metres.
{{/usCountry}}The early closure of the airport because of the runway expansion is also adding to the problem.
The flight to Mumbai at 3:20pm is being cancelled because the aircraft is not able to reach here before the closure time of 4pm.
Meanwhile, Air India has permanently suspended its early morning flight to Delhi at 7:30pm.
Among the flights that got delayed on Friday was Indigo’s Chandigarh-Delhi, which took off an hour an a half late from its scheduled departure at 8:30am.
Air India’s flights to Delhi and Pune also departed two hours late.
Meanwhile, 23 of 56 trains to Chandigarh arrived late on Friday. These included Una-Delhi Jan Shatabdi Express that was half hour late, while New Delhi-Kalka Shatabdi Express was 24 minutes late.
The weather department has predicted moderate fog during morning and evening on Saturday.