The southwest monsoon finally advanced over Delhi on July 13 morning, with several parts of the city receiving light showers.
The monsoon was scheduled to reach Delhi on June 27 but prevailing atmospheric conditions delayed its advancement. “The delay in monsoon advance was mainly due to no formation of low pressure area over Bay of Bengal, no presence of monsoon trough at mean sea level near Delhi and 5-6 Western disturbances moved west to east across North India which dominated over the monsoon easterlies,” the meteorological department said.
The met department had said that the monsoon would arrive early in Delhi by June 15 but changed the forecast on June 14 saying that it would be delayed. On June 5, it said that the monsoon would advance into remaining parts of west Uttar Pradesh, some more parts of Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan and Delhi around July 10. While the neighbouring areas received rain, the monsoon continued to elude the Capital till Tuesday morning.
“Such type of failure by numerical models in prediction of monsoon advance over Delhi is rare and uncommon. It is needless to mention that the IMD has predicted well with high accuracy about the advance of monsoon over Delhi in the recent past years and also the advance of monsoon over different parts of the country during the monsoon 2021 accurately about four to five days ahead,” the IMD said in a statement on Monday night.