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New Delhi: The National Capital Region is grappling with an extraordinary summer crisis as Delhi recorded its warmest night for the month of May in nearly fourteen years, highlighting the escalating challenges of urban climate change in Northern India. According to official data released by the India Meteorological Department (IMD), the city’s primary weather station at Safdarjung registered an astonishing minimum nighttime temperature of 32.4°C, which sits at a grueling 5.7 degrees above the seasonal normal. The severe nighttime warmth offers absolutely no respite to residents, breaking records that date back to May 26, 2012, when the mercury touched 32.5°C under similar extreme meteorological conditions. The crisis is not confined to the city center; peripheral weather monitoring stations like Palam, Lodi Road, Ridge, and Ayanagar all reported minimum nighttime temperatures hovering between 30°C and 32°C, cementing an official “warm night” declaration across the entire capital. A warm night is scientifically recognized by meteorologists when the daytime maximum consistently breaches the 40°C threshold while the nighttime minimum stays at least 4.5 to 6.4 degrees above the average baseline. This lack of nocturnal cooling has compounded the daytime misery, where peak temperatures have soared past 44.6°C, forcing the IMD to maintain a strict yellow alert for the capital and severe red alerts for neighboring states like Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. The persistent heatwave is driven by a stagnant high-pressure system trapping hot air over concrete landscapes, an issue heavily exacerbated by the urban heat island effect where roads and buildings absorb heat all day and radiate it back into the atmosphere at night. Hospitals in Delhi, including the Ram Manohar Lohia (RML) Hospital, have already begun admitting their first official heatstroke patients of the season, prompting health authorities to issue urgent public advisories. The extreme weather has also taken a severe toll on the region’s air quality, as mild evening dust storms have pushed the Air Quality Index (AQI) into the ‘poor’ category, trapping pollutants in the heavy, unmoving air.
