Record cold in Delhi

New Delhi suffers coldest day in 44 years

NEW DELHI: New Delhi has suffered its coldest day in 44 years amid a cold snap across northern India, the local weather office said on Thursday.

The News,

4 January, 2014, 2012

The maximum day temperature on Wednesday reached just 9.8 degrees Celsius, the lowest since the winter of 1969 when records first began, an official in the local meteorological department told AFP, with a minimum of 4.8 Celsius.

There is expected to be little respite in the coming few days with the weather office forecasting that chilly conditions will prevail.

The unusual cold has been attributed to dense fog which has obscured the sun and disrupted airports and trains, as well as icy winds from the snowy Himalayas to the north.

Winter in the Indian capital, home to 16.3 million people, usually lasts through January before giving way to spring and summer, when temperatures regularly rise to 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit)

New Year’s day set snow cover record in U.S.

Snow coverage in the United States on New Year's Day was the most in 10 years with 67 percent of the 48 contiguous states covered by snow, meteorologists say.

Terra Daily,

3 January, 2014,

That surpassed the previous record set in 2010, when the new year saw 61 percent of the United States beneath snow, AccuWeather.com reported Thursday.

That was the year of the mid-Atlantic blizzard dubbed "Snowmaggedon" that set a long list of records in cities such as Philadelphia, Washington and Baltimore.

"As far as New Year's Days go, I think that our [2013] snow cover is very healthy," AccuWeather.com Expert Senior Meteorologist Jack Boston said.

Unusually low snow coverage percentages since record keeping began in 2004, with the exception of 2010, have been an anomaly, Boston said. "The temperature of the North Atlantic ocean has been in a warm cycle and that has resulted in eastern North America, on average, having milder temperatures during the last decade."

However, he said, most of the contiguous United States was above normal in snow coverage for the month of December 2012 as well.