It is an understatement to say 2016 Bengaluru Summer has been setting some never before records and possibly would end up as a case study in the days to come for weather enthusiasts. On April 25th Bengaluru recorded 39.2 degrees the hottest day ever in its history breaking a record set way back in 1931 and that stood for almost 85 years. Longtime residents of the city say they have never seen this city so hot.
If we say Bengaluru has been hotter than Chennai this year no one would believe. But 2016 so far has seen more hotter days in Bengaluru than Chennai. While thanks to the pleasant climate the city sees during the month of January its average maximum temperature for 2016 so far is lesser than the average maximum temperatures recorded in the IMD observatory at Nungambakkam.
As one can see from the table above overall for the year 2016 Bengaluru has seen more hotter days than Chennai. If one were to ignore the winter period of January when Bengaluru has the altitude advantage it has been hotter on more than 70% days compared to Chennai. During the months of March & April 5 out of every 6 days has seen Bengaluru record higher temperature than Chennai. It is an understatement to say possibly this year Bengaluru Summer has set in fairly early which is showing up in these numbers nevertheless its pretty much unimaginable to think Bengaluru would have seen more hotter days than Chennai.
While we would have ideally wanted to do this comparison with Nungambakkam data, since we did not have the complete daily data for the period, we have given a comparison with Meenambakkam though as one can see in the table below Meenambakkam has been averaging almost 0.5 degrees hotter than Nungambakkam regularly. The above table possibly indicates how the 2016 Bengaluru Summer has been special so far. Almost a degree and a half hotter than last year, 0.5 degrees hotter than 2014. The maximum temperature recorded so far is almost 2.5 degrees hotter than the last 2 years pretty much sums up the hot days Beengaluru has seen this year.
While for comparison sake we have taken the Palace Road observatory in Bengaluru & Nungambakkam IMD observatory the above table indicates the Airport observatory in Chennai is hottest of the three. The below table gives an indication on how the monthly average temperatures have panned out over the last couple of years between Bengaluru & the Airport observatory in Chennai
Note: We would like to thank and appreciate weather blogger Rohit Santosh of Chennai who triggered the initial thought for trying to correlate Chennai & Bengaluru temperature pattern this year.