“ERROR IN THE SENSOR”
Delhi city authorities on Wednesday warned of dire water shortages and ordered teams to clamp down on wastage.
But the weather bureau also said it had sent a team to investigate a staggeringly high reading at an automatic weather station.
“Mungeshpur reported 52.9 degrees Celsius as an outlier compared to other stations,” the IMD said in a statement, referring to a station in a Delhi suburb.
“It could be due to (an) error in the sensor or the local factor.”
The bureau’s other sites recorded a maximum temperature over Delhi on Wednesday that “varied from 45.2 degrees Celsius to 49.1 degrees Celsius”, the statement added.
IMD meteorologist Soma Sen Roy told AFP that officers were “checking out” whether the station had recorded it correctly.
On Tuesday, two Delhi stations, at Mungeshpur, as well as at another automatic station at Narela, posted readings of 49.9 degrees Celsius.
The IMD said only its manned stations “should be considered to find out trends and extremes”.
In 2022, Delhi temperatures were recorded to have hit 49.2 degrees Celsius.
In 2016, 51 degrees Celsius was recorded in Phalodi on the edge of Rajasthan’s Thar Desert, the highest confirmed temperature in India.
“Temperature over urban areas varies from place to place,” the bureau added, saying variations could be due to factors such as the “proximity to water bodies, barren land”, parks or dense housing.
