If you are in Delhi-NCR and it felt like your skin was sizzling this afternoon or you thought it was the hottest it has ever been, you were not wrong. The national capital recorded its highest-ever temperature of 52.3 degrees Celsius, just 4.4 degrees shy of the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth: 56.7 degrees Celsius at the Greenland Ranch in California’s Death Valley.
The ranch is now aptly called the Furnace Creek Ranch.
According to data from the India Meteorological Department, the Mungeshpur weather station in northwest Delhi recorded the temperature-bulb-shattering number at 2.30 pm.
IMD regional head Kuldeep Srivastava said the city’s outskirts are the first areas to be hit by hot winds from Rajasthan.
“Parts of Delhi are particularly susceptible to the early arrival of these hot winds, worsening the already severe weather. Areas like Mungeshpur, Narela and Najafgarh are the first to experience the full force of these hot winds,” he was quoted as saying by news agency PTI.
At 51 degrees Celsius, the previous highest temperature in India was recorded in Rajasthan’s Phalodi in 2016. This was followed by 50.8 degrees in Churu, also in the desert state, in 2019 and 50.6 degrees in Alwar in 1956.
The world’s highest temperature, according to the Guinness World Records, was recorded on July 10, 1913. There is some dispute about the number, though, and if the current record is decertified – like the figure of 57.8 degrees Celsius recorded in Libya in 1922 – then the next highest figure will be 54 degrees, just 1.7 degrees higher than Delhi’s temperature today.
The national capital also recorded its all-time high power demand of 8,302 megawatts on Wednesday, powered by increased use of air conditioners. The use of air conditioners, however, also adds to the temperature by exacerbating the heat island effect in urban areas.
Speaking to NDTV earlier, Robert Muir-Wood, Chief Research Officer at Moody’s RMS, had said temperatures at the heart of cities can be as many as seven degrees higher than the areas surrounding them.
Listing the main causes of the heat island effect, Mr Muir-Wood had said, “There are three drivers, the first reason is that the surfaces of the buildings, the surfaces of the roads absorb a lot of heat. They tend to be dark materials. They may be glass and concrete, but they absorb a lot of heat. The second reason is that there are lower wind speeds inside a metropolitan area where you have a lot of big buildings. The bigger the buildings, the more they are slowing down the wind.”
“The third factor is that there will be a lot of air conditioning plants and other machinery, and cars in the middle of the city, and they are all producing heat too. Depending on how concentrated the population of buildings is, it can drive up the temperatures by five, six or seven degrees centigrade in the heart of the city,” the expert had said.
