The Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi has prepared a list for cities with comfortable hours during summer and winter weather in India. In a new study, IIT's Centre for Atmospheric Sciences (CAS) has ranked five cities on the basis of "comfortable hours". In this, Hyderabad tops the list with highest comfortable hours followed by Kolkata, Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai in the descending order.
The 'Comfort index' means hours that fall under temperature, humidity and wind speed conditions that is optimum for people to carry out light to moderate physical activities without being affected by the weather.
This comfort index is defined by Saskatchewan weather station in Canada that considers 15 to 25°C as comfortable temperature, while 25 to 32°C as warm. The index, according to IIT scientists, is suited for Indian cities too. The CAS team assessed temperature and other weather data for the five cities from 2004 to 2008 and then graded them under five categories - cool, comfortable, warm, uncomfortably hot and severe danger.
The study has found that 70% of the time all the five cities were uncomfortable. For instance, Hyderabad - which ranks first as per the comfort index - had only 28.9% of the time in the comfortable category but 18.6% of the time in the uncomfortably hot category. Delhi had 12.9% of time in the severe danger category and about 26.3% of time in the comfortable category. Mumbai surprisingly has only 0.3% of the time in the severe danger category. It concludes that less than 30% of the time in these cities is comfortable for outdoor activities or indoor time without cooling needs.
Photograph by Mckay savage
