Sleepless in Kolkata: Real feel night temperature soars to 38°C

KOLKATA: Unusually high real feel night temperatures over the week of up to 38° Celsius has the city tossing and turning at night in pools of sweat.
While the scorching afternoon sun explains fairly well how the daytime real feel temperature has been consistently hovering above 45° Celsius on most day, the absence of a balmy evening breeze acting as a respite from the daylight discomfort is sharply narrowing the gap between maximum and minimum temperatures.

Since Monday, the minimum temperature has gradually scaled up to about 30° Celsius from 27° while the real feel temperature has consistently been 5 to 8° higher. On Thursday, the minimum temperature was 28.9 degrees Celsius but the real feel was 38.
The unusually hot nights have been coinciding with local cloud formation in the evenings over the last few days. Regional Meteorological Centre (RMC) director G K Das said, "The nights have been exceptionally warm of late. Typically, in the absence of evening cloud formation, there is radiation cooling in the summer evening, allowing the temperature to drop. However, recently there has been local clouds forming in the evenings, trapping daytime heat in the atmosphere."
Das added that the clouds, however, are not an indication of a passing weather system likely to erupt in rainfall any time soon. "These are local clouds forming in static locations, gathering moisture from nearby water bodies," he said.
On Friday, the maximum temperature was recorded at 39.6° Celsius in Alipore, a notch high than Thursday, showing a rapid march towards another heat wave in the city. While isolated incidents of thunderstorms from the development of smaller pre-monsoon weather systems over neighbouring states are common during this time of the year, they have been swapped with sweltering dry weather. An uninterrupted dry spell this week could thrust actual maximum and minimum real feel temperatures above 40° Celsius for the next few days.
However, weathermen at the Alipore Met office maintain that there is unlikely to be any substantial rainfall until at least June 7. Only pre-monsoon nor'wester thunderstorm could pull down the mercury a few notches and restore the evening temperature to its typically cooler state.