According to reports, Delhi is facing the longest cold spell in a December in as long as fourteen years and apparently, it’s going to remain like this for a while.

Data available from IMD and Skymet Weather Services shows that the city hasn’t experienced temperature lower than six degrees Celsius for more than five days in the last fourteen years unlike this year,

The temperature dropped down to 3.4 degrees Celsius which is 3 degrees lower than the normal temperature on Thursday and gave Delhi the coldest day of the year so far.

Kuldeep Srivastava, head of the regional weather forecasting centre in Delhi said,

“The minimum temperature has remained below six degrees since December 18. The night temperature is expected to remain below 5 degrees Celsius and cold wave conditions are likely to continue over the next five days at least. The lowest temperature was recorded on Thursday.”

The last few times Delhi experienced long cold spells were in the years 2014, 2011 and 2007. But in the last two years, the mercury didn’t go below six degrees Celsius.

BP Yadav, deputy director general of IMD added,

“This year, December has been unusually cold, both in terms of daily minimum temperature and the continuity of the cold spell. Such long cold spell hasn’t been recorded in recent times.”

Since January is usually colder than December, BP Yadav also added that it’s not necessary that the next month will behave the way as this one in terms of temperature.

He said,

“Even though January is usually colder than December, it is too early to say if January 2019 will behave the same way. Just because December was colder than usual this time, we can’t say that January too will be colder than previous years.”

Bring out the monkey caps!