At 9 hours, Delhi sees season's longest zero visibility spell as dense fog shrouds city

New Delhi: The national capital and surrounding areas on Saturday witnessed the season’s longest duration of heavy fog that kept the visibility at zero mt for nine hours at Palam airport even as the meteorologist warn about “very dense to dense” fog conditions across the north-west India and Gangetic plains on Sunday.

The India Meteorological Department has also alerted about heavy rainfall/snowfall for Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal and Uttarakhand for the next two days. A fresh round of Western Disturbances is expected between Jan 10-12 bringing rains in north west India.

"Zero visibility prevailed for nine hours over Palam between 1130 PM to 830 AM. It was the longest of this season. At Safdarjung, zero visibility was for eight hours," an IMD official said. Other northern airports that recorded zero visibility on Saturday morning are Amritsar, Agra, Hindon, Chandigarh and Gwalior.

Satellite images show a dense fog cover spreading over the north-west and Gangetic plains and extending to parts of north east. Similar conditions are likely on Sunday too with the weather bureau predicting very dense fog in north Madhya Pradesh and Bihar while dense fog in other places.

“Dense fog conditions are likely to continue over parts of north India from late night of today to morning hours of tomorrow and improve thereafter,” the IMD says in an update.

Some of the other airports with poor visibility were Khajuraho (50 mt at 830 AM), Patna and Srinagar (both 100 mt). In Delhi which was facing dense fog for the second consecutive day, as many 19 flights were diverted and over 200 flights were delayed. Also 81 trains were delayed.

Minimum temperatures were below 0°C over many parts of Jammu, Kashmir & Ladakh; 0-5°C over Himachal Pradesh; 6-10°C over north-west India and 10-14°C in parts of central, east & west India.

Nyoma in Ladakh recorded the lowest temperature at -9 degrees Celsius followed by Tabo in Himachal Pradesh (-8.4C) and Qazigund in J&K (-6.6 C). In the plains some of the lowest minimum temperatures were recorded at Ballowal in Punjab (4.2 degrees C), Narnaul in Haryana (4.4 C) and Mandla in east Madhya Pradesh (5 C).