Archive for ‘Meteorological Department’

30/09/2019

Floods kill 113 in north India in late monsoon burst, jail, hospital submerged

LUCKNOW, India (Reuters) – Heavy rains have killed at least 113 people in India’s Uttar Pradesh and Bihar states over the past three days, officials said on Monday, as flood waters swamped a major city, inundated hospital wards and forced the evacuation of inmates from a jail.

India’s monsoon season that begins in June usually starts to retreat by early September, but heavy rains have continued across parts of the country this year, triggering floods.

An official said that at least 93 people had died in most populous Uttar Pradesh since Friday after its eastern areas were lashed by intense monsoon showers.

Rising water levels forced authorities to shift 900 inmates from a prison in eastern Ballia district, police officer Santosh Verma said.

In neighbouring Bihar, an impoverished agrarian region that was hit by floods earlier this year, the death toll from the latest bout of rain had reached 20 on Monday, a state government official said.

Bihar’s capital city of Patna, home to around 2 million, has been badly hit, with waist-deep flood waters across many streets, and entering homes, shops, and even the wards of a major hospital. In some parts, authorities deployed boats to rescue residents.

“The rains have stopped but there is waterlogging in many areas,” Bihar’s Additional Secretary in the Disaster Relief Department Amod Kumar Sharan said.

In its bulletin on Monday, India’s Meteorological Department said the intensity of rainfall over Bihar was very likely to reduce. Showers in Uttar Pradesh are also expected to abate this week.

Weather department officials said this month that monsoon rains were likely to be above average for the first time in six years. [nL3N26B1MD]

Source: Reuters

03/06/2019

World’s 15 hottest places are in India, Pakistan as pre-monsoon heat builds

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India warned of severe heat in northern and central areas on Monday, following similar extreme weather on Sunday.

Of the 15 hottest places in the world in the past 24 hours, eight were in India with the others in neighbouring Pakistan, according to weather monitoring website El Dorado.

Churu, a city in the west of the northern state of Rajasthan, recorded the country’s highest temperature of 48.9 Celsius (120 Fahrenheit) on Monday, according to the Meteorological Department.

Churu has issued a heat wave advisory and government hospitals have prepared emergency wards with extra air conditioners, coolers and medicines, said Ramratan Sonkariya, additional district magistrate for Churu.

Water is also being poured on the roads of Churu, known as the gateway to the Thar desert, to keep the temperature down and prevent them from melting, Sonkariya added.

A farmer from Sikar district in Rajasthan died on Sunday due to heatstroke, state government officials said.

Media reported on Friday that 17 had died over the past three weeks due to a heatwave in the southern state of Telangana. A state official said it would confirm the number of deaths only after the causes had been ascertained.

The temperature in New Delhi touched 44.6C (112.3F) on Sunday. One food delivery app, Zomato, asked its customers to greet delivery staff with a glass of cold water.

Heat wave warnings were issued on Monday for some places in western Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh state.

The monsoon, which brings down the heat, is likely to begin on the southern coast on June 6, the weather office said last month.

The three-month, pre-monsoon season, which ended on May 31, was the second driest in the last 65 years, India’s only private forecaster, Skymet, said, with a national average of 99 mm of rain against the normal average of 131.5 mm for the season.

Source: Reuters

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