December is here but the weather feels nothing like it.
On Thursday, the Met office recorded a minimum temperature of 19.6 degrees Celsius in Alipore, three notches above normal. A day before, the minimum temperature was 21.8 degrees Celsius, a staggering five notches above normal.
December’s average minimum temperature in Kolkata, based on the daily input collected by the Met office over the past three decades, is around 15.2 degrees Celsius.
Last Sunday, the minimum temperature in Kolkata was 16.5 degrees Celsius. A steep rise within a short time makes children and elders with respiratory problems vulnerable to bouts of cough and cold, doctors have warned.
Many Kolkatans who had switched off the fans and ACs last week had thought they had done so for good this season. But that was not to be.
“Last week, I needed a jacket while riding my bike even when the sun was shining brightly. Yesterday, a jacket felt hot even early in the morning,” said Utsav Paul, a marketing executive with a pharma company who has to ride between his Behala home in southwest Kolkata and Salt Lake office in the northeast and attend to clients almost every day.
A Met official attributed the unusual weather to the systems in the Bay of Bengal.
“A cyclonic circulation was persisting over west-central Bay of Bengal till Wednesday. Under its influence, the flow of northwesterly winds got disrupted,” said G.K. Das, director, India Meteorological Department, Kolkata.
Instead of winds from Kashmir, northeasterly winds started entering the city from Bangladesh and Assam.
“The system dissipated on Thursday, paving the way for the comeback of the northwesterly winds but only marginally. That is why the mercury dipped slightly on Thursday,” he said.
The minimum temperature is likely to go down slightly in the next couple of days. But the advent of a fresh system near the Andaman Sea, likely on December 4, might again prove a stumbling block for the northwesterly winds flowing into the city, according to the forecast.
The absence of fresh snowfall in the upper reaches of the country has also contributed to a general rise in temperature across northern India, said Met officials.