New Delhi: North India is facing its coldest December in five years. The biting cold has claimed 17 lives in Uttar Pradesh.
Jalandhar faced the coldest day of the season with the temperature dipping as low as minus 2.2 degree Celsius. Amritsar shivered at one degree and the state capital Chandigarh was at 5.6 degree Celsius.
New Delhi recorded a minimum temperature of 6.1 degrees while Dehradun recorded 5 degrees.
Further north, Simla hovered around five while Jammu-Kashmir's capital Srinagar continued to be the coldest at five degrees below zero.
The worst-affected are the poor and the homeless who had no shelter to shield them from the biting cold.
In the capital, those who had no place to stay occupied the pavements and roadsides, huddled around a fire.
Met Department predicts the cold wave will intensify in the coming days and temperatures will continue to fall.
The low temperatures have been attributed to western disturbances (WDs).
As a rule, WDs are more difficult to predict than monsoon.
They travel eastwards in higher latitudes of 30 deg N to 60 deg N and enter the western Himalayan region from the Mediterranean Sea or the west Atlantic.
WDs approach the Indian subcontinent in the form of a trough in the upper and middle tropospheric westerlies.
They occasionally deepen after entering the Indo-Pak area, particularly over Rajasthan and Punjab.
The intensification is the combined effect of incursion of moist air from the Arabian Sea and the orography of the region.
Comments
0 comment