IMD confirms Delhi’s 52.9°C temperature anomaly as ‘sensor error’, relief expected from heatwave

The Indian Meteorological Department( IMD) released Temperature data over Delhi based on its Automatic Weather Stations (AWS) network installed since summer season of 2022 and made operational reporting of temperature and rainfall observations for 15 new locations spread over different parts of Delhi and NCR (in addition to manual departmental stations).

According to IMD, the maximum temperature as recorded on 29th May, 2024 (today) by 5 departmental observatories (Safdarjung, Palam, Ayanagar, Ridge and Lodi Road) and 15 AWS are given in Table 1.

 The maximum temperature over Delhi NCR varied from 45.2° to 49.1°C in different parts of city, Mungeshpur reported 52.9°C as an outlier compared to other stations. It could be due to error in the sensor or the local factor. IMD is examining the data and sensors. Maximum temperature of today, i.e. 29th May, 2024 has fallen over Delhi at many places compared to yesterday (Refer Table 1). It has rained at many places in Delhi in the afternoon resulting in further fall of temperature. Heat wave conditions will reduce during next 2 – 3 days due to gradual fall in temperature in association with approaching western disturbance, rainfall/thunderstorm and southwesterly wind blowing from Arabian Sea to northwest India.

Temperature over urban areas varies from place to place due to local exposure such as proximity to water bodies, barren land, concrete and dense urban cluster, green areas etc. IMD has five major stations regularly reporting observations since long period and they are referred to as climate stations. The long period data fulfilling all the exposure conditions are available from these 5 department observatories of IMD as shown in Table 1. Data from these five stations should be considered to find out trend and extremes.

Table 1: Maximum temperature observed over different locations in Delhi-NCR on 28th and 29th May and its tendency.