New Delhi, Dec 27 (EFE).- Blinding fog, reducing visibility to a mere 50 meters, disrupted railway and flight operations in much of northern India on Wednesday morning.
Residents in the Indian capital, New Delhi, and its satellite towns of Noida, Gurugram, Faridabad, and Ghaziabad woke up to a thick cover of low-lying stratus, making it difficult to see even their neighborhood houses.
At the capital’s international airport, dozens of domestic and international flights were affected as visibility dropped to just 50 meters, a live flight tracker showed.
“While landings and takeoffs continue at Delhi airport, flights that are not CAT III compliant may get affected,” the airport authorities wrote on the social media platform X, urging passengers to contact their airlines for updated information.
The CAT III technology helps planes land in low visibility conditions like dense fog.
Fog has affected much of northern India for the past two days, causing delays in 14 trains since Tuesday, the Indian Railways public relations office said.
“Dense to very dense fog observed over many parts of north west India during the morning hours of today,” the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said, noting that visibility conditions were less than 50 meters in parts of New Delhi.
The IMD also warned of the potential harmful effects of dense fog on health, due to the presence of polluting particles in the region that figures in the list of areas with the worst air quality on the planet.
According to the Swiss platform IQAir, New Delhi ranked fourth among the most polluted cities, with an air quality index of 231 and concentrations of 180 micrograms of PM 2.5 per cubic meter of air, well above the daily limit of 15 micrograms set by the World Health Organization (WHO). EFE
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