New Year’s first rain improves City’s air quality

LAHORE: The New Year’s first rain, though scattered and below moderate, improved City’s deteriorating AQI here on Sunday while Met office predicted similar weather conditions for the next 24 hours.

The rain started in the morning and continued till evening in spans in various city localities. As soon as the rain started, Wasa MD Ghafran Ahmed directed all the operation staff to remain active and clear the roads from the stagnant rainwater as soon as possible. He also visited the disposal stations and monitored the readiness. He said no negligence will be tolerated.

Met officials said a frontal weather system was affecting upper parts of the country and likely to persist till Monday (today). The Met office predicted that cloudy weather with rain/snowfall was expected in Kashmir, Murree, Galliyat, Gilgit-Baltistan and upper Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Moderate to dense fog was likely to persist in most plain areas of Punjab and upper Sindh during morning/night hours.

Rainfall was also recorded in several other cities while snowfall was recorded at Chitral, Kalam, Drosh and Malam Jabba. Sunday’s minimum temperature was recorded at Ziarat where mercury dropped to -11°C while in Lahore it was 7.3°C and maximum was 17.5°C.

After the rain, the average AQI was recorded as 169 (unhealthy) and the PM2.5 concentration was 16.4 times the World Health Organisation annual PM2.5 guideline value. The most polluted city localities included US Consulate (573), Near Ada Plot, Raiwind Road (394), Askari 10 (272), Phase8-DHA (248) and Shahrah-e-Quaid-e-Azam (195).

Meanwhile in its monthly report, the Met said that December 2024 witnessed rainfall of only 1.6mm, which was excessively below average with a negative anomaly of -88%. The heaviest one-day rainfall of 25mm occurred at Mirkhani (KP) on 3rd December, whereas the station of Kalam (KP) has been the wettest place with monthly total of 33mm.

The national mean monthly temperature of 12.27°C for Pakistan was cooler by -0.49°C than the country’s average of 12.77°C. The daytime (maximum) temperature (20.03°C) at country-level also happened to be cooler but by lesser extent of -0.22°C than the country-average of 20.25°C. The report added that the country-level nighttime (minimum) temperature of 4.5°C too was slightly cooler by -0.35°C than the country wide average of 4.85°C.

The hottest day of the month was observed at Gwadar (Balochistan) on 5th December when it recorded a maximum temperature of 33.5°C, whereas the station, Lasbela (Balochistan) found to be the warmest place with a mean monthly maximum temperature of 28.4°C.

The coldest night temperature of -13.2°C of the month was recorded at Skardu (GB) on 26th December. Coincidentally, the same station happened to be the coolest place with mean monthly minimum temperature of -8.2°C, the report concluded.