KOLKATA: Gusty winds and heavy rain lashed Dum Dum, Lake Town, Salt Lake, New Town and
Dunlop on Saturday evening, bringing down the temperature by 2.5°C and crippling traffic on the roads and in the air. The rest of the city experienced lightning, strong winds and moderate rain. The Regional Meteorological Centre (
RMC) in Alipore has issued a thunderstorm warning for Sunday too. Cricket fans, though, are hoping the weather won’t play spoilsport in this season’s
IPL opener at Eden Gardens.
In parts of northeast
Kolkata, heavy rain for an hour led to waterlogging in stretches of Jessore Road. The ripple effect caused traffic snarls that extended to VIP Road. In stretches of EM Bypass, too, traffic flow was slow.
In the air, the gusty winds posed a threat to aircraft flying in to land in Kolkata. With the swirling wind making landing approach risky, arrivals were put on hold, leading to diversion of five flights.
The Met office at the airport put the wind speed at 45kmph around 7pm. Saturday’s maximum wind speed was 63kmph, making it a nor’wester.
RMC director G K Das said the thundershower was generated by an east-west low pressure trough that extended from Jharkhand to Rajasthan and a cyclonic circulation over
Bay of Bengal. On Sunday evening, too, the city could be lashed by a thunderstorm.
“The northern parts of Kolkata and the districts of Hooghly, North 24 Parganas and Nadia were lashed by a thunderstorm. Rain was moderate in the rest of the city. Saturday’s storm was not a squall. Since favourable conditions persist, we expect a moderate thunderstorm on Sunday evening as well. But chances of it actually striking are not very high,” said Das.
This season, Kolkata received just one squall last Sunday that had a wind speed of 85kmph. At least three thunderstorms have given the city a miss, brushing past the northern fringes. To qualify as a squall, a thunderstorm has to be accompanied by winds at a minimum speed of 45kmph and has to last at least a minute. Even though conditions favourable for thunderstorms have been developing, the systems have been losing steam before hitting Kolkata, experts said.
