The winter season is at its chilling peak in Punjab and other parts of Northern India with the start of January 2025. Dense fog has not only enveloped Punjab and its surrounding states but it has also disrupted flight and train services. On Saturday, due to dense fog in Amritsar, domestic and international flights departing from Sri Guru Ram Dass Jee International Airport were disrupted. A Qatar Airways flight arriving from Doha in the early hours of the morning and a flight arriving from Milan (both flights) are arriving about 7 hours late (While writing).
In the meanwhile, the weather department has predicted thunderstorms in multiple districts of Punjab for the next two days. As per India Meteorological Department (IMD) Chandigarh, multiple districts of Punjab may witness thunderstorms on January 5 and January 6, 2025.
IMD Chandigarh has predicted that cities like Pathankot, Gurdaspur, Hoshiarpur, Amritsar, Kapurthala, Jalandhar, Nawanshahar, etc will witness thunderstorms i.e. winter rainfall on January 5, 2025. On January 6, cities like Sanguru, Patiala, Jalandhar, Rupnagar, Mohali, Fatehgarh Sahib, Amritsar, Gurdaspur, etc may witness rainfall.
Punjab is already witnessing cold to serve cold waves. The IMD defines cold wave conditions as when the minimum temperature of a station is 10 degrees celsius or less for plain areas and 0 degrees celsius for hilly regions. Key states like Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, and Ladakh, the region typically receives 18% of its annual rainfall during this time, with Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh relying on it for nearly a third of their annual precipitation.
However, IMD has mentioned that the region has received below-average rain this year and it is concerning for agriculture and water resource management