Photo essay | The heat is on
May, the official start of the hot season, is still a day away yet many parts of India are already feeling the blast of summer
At 39.2 degrees Celsius, Bengaluru recorded the highest temperature in 85 years on 24 April. The city’s fantastic weather was once as famous as its quaint little microbreweries, thick green cover and great music.
On the same day, Titlagarh in Odisha recorded a high of 48.5 degrees Celsius.
The last time Bengaluru came close to 39 degrees Celsius was on 30 April 1931, when it recorded a temperature of 38.3 degrees Celsius, says B. Puttanna former director of the India Meteorological Department (IMD), Karnataka.
“I have grown up in this city but this easily feels like the hottest summer of my life," says Joel Johnson, who works in the game development industry. “It is so hot that set-top boxes in the city are shutting down: The dishes are getting heated up and in turn transmitting the heat to the box through wires," he adds.
But it isn’t just Bengaluru. As Mint reported on 15 April, the IMD had warned that several areas would face heat-wave conditions over the next few days. It listed Haryana, Chandigarh, Delhi, Rajasthan, Gangetic West Bengal, Odisha, Marathwada, Vidarbha, Telangana, Rayalaseema and Tamil Nadu.
Vellore in Tamil Nadu recorded 43.7 degrees Celsius on 24 April, while Nagpur in Maharashtra has become a heat island of sorts, with the temperature crossing 40 degrees Celsius 20 days in a row, according to a report by Skymet Weather Services, a private Indian company that provides weather forecasts and solutions.
A dust storm swept across a sweltering Delhi on 27 April, providing a respite. But only briefly. “I was coming back from the airport, when what seemed like a pleasant break from the heat wave suddenly turned into a blinding experience," recalls Kanwar Brara, a corporate trainer. “And now it is back to being as hot as it was."
While urban India sweats it out, managing to get by somehow, a drought has vast tracts of rural India in its grip.
And it isn’t likely to get any better. The IMD said in its summer forecast earlier this month that temperatures across the country would soar above normal between April and June, with the north-west set to experience a particularly hot summer. The heat has already claimed 100 lives in Odisha and close to 140 in Telangana.
The onslaught last year of El Niño, a phenomenon that leads to unusual warming in the Pacific, led to a rise in temperatures globally. This, coupled with climate change, has led to a brutal heat-wave across South-East Asia and India. “There is always a marked increase in temperature the year after El Niño," says Pradeep John, a Chennai-based independent weather blogger who tweets under the name TamilNadu Weatherman.
G.P. Sharma, vice-president, meteorology, at Skymet Weather Services, agrees. “The heat spells have been long and prolonged this year because of El Niño," he says, adding that April is never usually so hot. “Normally we see some pre-monsoon activity as well that helps take away the heat," he says.
The silver lining to all this? “Excessive heat can be a positive indicator of a good monsoon," says Sharma.
Bengaluru, 27 April: A woman shields her child from the blistering sun with her dupatta. Photo: Hemant Mishra/Mint
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