India Meteorological Department

While the minimum temperature this morning settled at 27 degrees Celsius, two notches below than Tuesday,  the maximum is  expected to hover around 35 degrees, it said. The weatherman has issued a yellow alert, warning flooding on low-lying areas leading to disruption of traffic on key roads. Moreover, the relative humidity at 8.30 a.m. this morning was recorded at 85 per cent.

El Nino is a weather phenomenon that involves an abnormal warming up of water surface temperatures in the eastern and central Pacific Ocean, and tends to suppress monsoon rainfall in India. A senior IMD official said that as Sea Surface Temperature (SST) conditions over the Pacific and the Indian Oceans are known to have strong influence on Indian monsoon and the weather department is carefully monitoring the evolution of sea surface conditions over these Ocean basins.

IMD added that the southwest monsoon has moved to some parts of Telangana, most parts of Andhra Pradesh, parts of Odisha, parts of westcentral-northwest Bay of Bengal, more parts of Gangetic West Bengal, Jharkhand and Bihar. "Conditions are favourable for further advance of Southwest Monsoon over some more parts of south Peninsular India, remaining parts of Odisha, Gangetic West Bengal, Jharkhand and Bihar and some parts of Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh during next two-three days," the weather forecast agency predicted.

The IMD said that on Wednesday, heavy to very heavy rainfall at isolated places is very likely over Sub-Himalayan West Bengal and Sikkim while heavy to very heavy rainfall is likely at isolated places over Assam and Meghalaya. "On Wednesday there will be heavy rainfall at isolated places.

According to the India Meteorological Department, Delhi will continue to be in the grip of a cold wave on Sunday and Monday. In the next 48 hours, the city's temperature may come down to 4 degrees. At the same time, the maximum temperature is expected to be 19 degrees on Sunday and 20 degrees on Monday. The minimum temperature of Delhi was recorded at 5.3 degree Celsius on Sunday morning.

The IMD also said "normal to below normal" rainfall is most likely over most parts of east and northeast India and areas adjacent to east central India and some parts of west south peninsular India. Monthly rainfall for July 2022 over the country as a whole is most likely to be normal, i.e., ranging between 94 and 106 per cent of the Long Period Average (LPA).

The 'normal' monsoon rainfall for the country, as a whole, would mean within a range of 96 to 104 per cent of the LPA, which is 87 cm or 870 mm. The IMD had, this April, introduced the new LPA, the new rainfall normal based on rainfall data from 1971-2020 for the southwest monsoon season, replacing the till then used rainfall normal that was based on data from 1961-2010.