When Delhi’s Mungeshpur weather station recorded a maximum temperature of 52.9 degrees Celsius on May 29, it was on account of “malfunctioning of the sensor,” the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has said. Experts from the IMD have found that the automatic weather station (AWS) sensor at Mungeshpur was reporting temperatures “about 3 degrees Celsius higher than the maximum temperature reported by the standard instrument.” The maximum temperature of 52.9 degrees at Mungeshpur was an all-time high for any location in India and this had prompted the IMD to verify the recording at the station. A committee of experts from the IMD was constituted to review the reading at Mungeshpur, which, according to the IMD, was “an outlier compared to other observatories in Delhi,” and this reading had “exceeded the earlier all-time highest maximum temperature of 48.4 degrees at Palam on May 26, 1998.” On the same day, no other observatory in Delhi had crossed the 50-degree mark. At other stations, the maximum temperature was between 45.2 degrees and 49.1 degrees. The committee evaluated the AWS sensor at Mungeshpur and compared it with other automatic weather stations in the city. While the maximum temperature recorded at Mungeshpur was found to be 3 degrees higher than standard instruments, no significant discrepancies were found in temperatures reported by other AWS stations in Delhi, the IMD said. “Necessary remedial measures are being taken up by the IMD to avoid the repetition of such errors in AWS,” the IMD said in a statement. Mungeshpur recorded a maximum temperature of 48.8 degrees on May 27, 49.9 degrees on May 28, and 52.9 degrees on May 29. At an automatic weather station, weather parameters are recorded and transmitted automatically, without manual intervention. In contrast, at a manual observatory, observations are taken manually every three hours. On May 29, the manual observatory at Safdarjung, which serves as a marker for the city, recorded a maximum temperature of 46.8 degrees Celsius.
