Will the rains keep eluding Delhi?

Little or no rain has begun to disappoint and worry the people in the national capital. And everyone is asking the same question… have the monsoon rains left the city? Is it yet another year of weak monsoons in Delhi?

Going by the rainfall data in the month of July, this assumption could be true but it is still too early to predict anything of this kind say weather experts.

Data reveals that despite of 70mm of heavy rain at the Safdurjung station last Sunday, rainfall figures are still below normal in Delhi for the month of July.

“Our weather models clearly show that rain in Delhi in the month of July will be below the normal average and the main reason for this would be that the rain will only occur in patches in the city and will not be widespread”, informs Mahesh Palawat, head of the statistics team at Skymet Weather.

“Despite moderate to heavy rain in some pockets of the city in the first half of the month, the average rainfall figure may fall below normal as there would be very little rain during the last week of the month.” adds Palawat.

“We were driving from south Delhi to east Delhi on Monday and we saw it was raining in the eastern part, i.e. near Karkaduma and Lakshmi Nagar. It was a short spell of half an hour but with good rain. My colleagues and I were disappointed that it did not rain in our part of the city that day but we are happy at least we witnessed it somewhere. “We all are eagerly awaiting heavy rains”, shares a marketing manager, Abhishek Gupta.

The normal rainfall figure for Delhi is 214mm for the month of July whereas the figures show that there has been only one heavy spell of rain in the capital, which was 70mm on the 9^th of July. Figures also prove that rain was only patchy because while it rained heavily at the Safdurjung station, Palam only recorded 27mm of rain.

Moreover, other than the one heavy spell, there have been only two instances of moderate rainfall of up to 30mm in the city. These were, 21.2mm of rain at Safdurjung and 11.4mm at Palam on the 12^th of July and 32mm of rain at Safdurjung and Nil recorded at Palam, yesterday, on the 16^th of July.

There have been close to nine days of nil rain in the city in the last sixteen days and two days of patchy rain of below 15mm. 14.4mm at Palam and no rain at Safdurjung on the 7^th of July and 11mm of rain at Palam and 1.5mm at Safdurjung on the 10^th of July.

“We are expecting patchy rain in Delhi, with one or two good spells on the 19^th and 20^th of July. Rain will continue till the 25^th and may become very light or nil afterwards, informs, Mahesh Palawat.

Photo by Ritika Acharya.