Will it rain in Delhi on Monday? IMD has been issuing rainfall warnings for almost every day.
The India Meteorological Department is generally very accurate when it comes to weather predictions. However, over the past few days, it has made erroneous predictions regarding Delhi rains. In the last 10 days, Delhi’s base weather observatory, the Safdarjung Observatory, has recorded just 2.6 mm rainfall. The monsoon in Delhi began on a bumper note with the national capital receiving very heavy rainfall between June 30 and July 1. It has been a dry spell since then. But IMD has been issuing rainfall warnings for almost every day. On July 1, the weather office issued the orange alert. It issued the yellow alert for the next six days. The city received only 2 mm rainfall during this period. Why isn’t it raining in Delhi?
Experts say the dry spell is the result of monsoon moving towards central India due to a low pressure area over Odisha. From there it travelled to Gujarat.
Mahesh Palawat, vice president (meteorology and climate change), Skymet Weather, said the low pressure area had pulled the monsoon towards central India which has been receiving heavy rainfall.
IMD’s predictions have not been wrong only for Delhi. It had predicted “fairly widespread to widespread rainfall activity” over west Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh, Delhi and Rajasthan on July 9 and July 10, and issued a yellow alert, warning of moderate rainfall in the capital on Sunday. It was wrong.
The official said it was expected that the monsoon trough would shift towards north India after the low pressure area dissipated. But a cyclonic circulation over Rajasthan and Pakistan prevented the monsoon returning to Delhi.
Former secretary, Ministry of Earth Sciences, Madhavan Nair Rajeevan, told the news agency PTI that it was unlikely that Delhi would receive rainfall on Monday and Tuesday. Rains can happen on July 13 and July 14. He said the wrong predictions by IMD mustn’t happen often. He said issuing colour-coded alerts means the agency is confident about its prediction. Predictions shouldn’t be wrong because the agency had modern equipment at its disposal.
Explaining why IMD might have been wrong, he said localised weather forecasts have become complicated because models do not account for pollution, aerosols and land use changes.
With inputs from PTI
