Saturday, December 08, 2007

Coldest day for Chennai????

The lowest temperature in chennai in the past 10 years was 62 degrees Fahrenheit i.e. about 16.7 degrees Centigrade. This was recorded on 27th January 1999.
The link I have provided in the source will give you the recorded temperature by days for any day/month or week and you can review the temperatures over December, January and February months over the last 10 years and figure out the coldest days in Chennai.
In addition, in the last 10 years, 64 deg F was recorded on the following days: (with the Max temp in parenthesis)
30 Jan 1999 - 64 (89)
31 Jan 1999 - 64 (87)
20 Feb 2004- 64 (87)
14 Feb 2005- 64 (94)
19 Jan 2006 - 64 (87)
15 Feb 2006- 64 (90)
In addition, you will find that there was this recorded temperature of 41 deg F on Dec 19, 1999 (at 10 am) and also 37.4 deg F on 4 Feb 2004 (at 2 am). Interestingly, within an hour of these records, the temperature was above 70 deg F. Therefore, it is very likely that these were human errors while creating the webpage. I believe the above to be true based on the following, which records that in the NOrth, you do not get temp below 10.2 since 70's!
Elsewhere, you find the following, which is authentic record from weather related sites about Tamil Nadu, and yuo can infer from this, some truth about Chennai (madras):
In Tamil Nadu January is the coldest month when the daily minimum temperature for the state as a whole is 21C varing from about 16C in the north to about 24C in the south. The lowest temperature ever recorded at an individual station in the plain is 10.2C. at Tirupattur on 15th December 1974 which is 5.9C lower than the normal of the coldest month. In the ghat areas Uthagamandalam registered the lowest minimum temperature of -2.1C on 7th January 1976 which is 7.3C lower than the normal of the coldest month.
Finally, some sites state the lowest temp recorded in Chennai as being 15.8, which although authentic (mentioned in many sites and books about Chennai), but possibly not in the last ten years as the temp never went below 62 deg F in the last 10 years (but for those two dates, which i believe are human errors in recording in the internet page!).
btw, 15.8 deg C means 60.44 deg Fahrenheit - almost 1.56 degree F lower than the recorded 62 in the last 10 years.

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