- By Talib Khan
- Thu, 25 Jul 2019 10:26 AM (IST)
- Source:JND
New Delhi | Jagran News Desk: Every year, Mumbai suffers in the monsoon season as the city submerges into water following incessant rains. The monsoon regained its vigour over Mumbai bringing heavy rains in the city and surrounding areas since Tuesday night. The weather department has issued an alert and said that there is a significant cloud build-up over the city and the forecast for Thursday is heavy rainfall at isolated places.
Almost all of the rain in the financial capital was recorded in just six hours, between 11.30pm and 5.30am till Wednesday. The weather bureau said this was the second instance this season when intense spells were witnessed overnight; the first was on July 1-2, when 375mm of rainfall was recorded by the Santacruz observatory.
The plentiful rain however, have helped in improving the Air Quality Index of the city, coming to 15 on the scale, which is the best this season and the second best since monitoring began in 2015.
Meanwhile, Delhi and the National Capital Region, also received some rain in past few days but the IMD has issued a ‘red alert’ for Thursday and an ‘orange alert’ for Friday as the national capital could witness strongest spell of rainfall of this monsoon.
With around 21.6mm rainfall recorded on Wednesday in Delhi’s Safdarjung station between 5:30 to 8:30 pm, the MeT officials said that the intensity of rain is expected to pick up overnight.
Delhi, till July 24, has received 156.4mm of rainfall against a normal of 156.5mm rain. The seasonal deficit so far is 24%, recording 167.7mm of rainfall this season against a normal of 221.9mm. Kuldeep Srivastava, scientist at IMD, said the spell of rain over the next 48 hours should help Delhi cover this deficit and achieve a surplus.
“Orange alert remains for NCR and the heaviest spell could be recorded over the next two days. Moderate showers should occur in general, with some parts of the city expected to receive heavy rainfall as well. The intensity will be strongest on Thursday, and hence the red alert has been issued. Temperatures should also drop considerably, reducing humidity levels to an extent,” said Srivastava.
With the increase in rainfall Delhi’s air quality was classified as ‘moderate’ on Thursday with an Air Quality Index of 164. SAFAR, a forecast body, said considerable improvement is expected over the next 48 hours.