New Delhi, Jul 28 (IANS): The India Meteorological Department (IMD) on Tuesday sounded an orange alert for the national capital for the next two days and stated that the city is likely to experience moderate rain with one or two spells of heavy rainfall on Tuesday and Wednesday evening.
The weather bureau warned that the heavy rainfall could lead to disruption of traffic due to flooding of roads, waterlogging in low-lying areas and disruption of municipal services like water and electricity.
"Delhi-NCR is very likely to experience moderate rain with one or two spells of heavy rainfall (more than 65mm) during evening of July 29 to July 30, 2020," according to the Delhi's Regional Weather Forecasting Centre.
IMD has four colour-coded warnings as per the intensity of any weather system -- green, yellow, orange and red. Orange alert is given to authorities to be prepared.
Kuldeep Srivastava, head of IMD's regional forecasting centre said: "Currently monsoon trough is running close to foothills of Himalaya. From the evening of July 28, monsoon trough i.e. line of low pressure would shift southwards and continue to pass very close to Delhi-NCR, during evening of July 28 to July 30."
He added that during the night of Tuesday and Wednesday, Southwesterly winds from the Arabian sea and Easterly winds from the Bay of Bengal will reach Haryana, Delhi-NCR, western Uttar Pradesh and north-east Rajasthan.
"Under influence of these systems heavy to very heavy rainfall would also occur over these areas," he said.
According to the IMD, Safdarjung observatory, which provides representative figures for the city, recorded a rainfall of 226.8 mm in July. There were 12 rainy days this month. The observatory had recorded the all-time wettest July in 2003 when it recorded the rainfall of 632.2 mm.
Meanwhile, the maximum and minimum temperature on Tuesday will hover around 37 and 28.7 degrees Celsius but will drop to 35 and 26 degrees Celsius on Wednesday, and 33 and 25 degrees Celsius on Thursday.
The air quality of the national capital is in the satisfactory category, with the particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 and 10 microns, which are too small to be filtered out of the body, mounting to 77 and 25 micrograms per cubic.