Overview
- Uttar Pradesh is under a red alert for dense to very dense fog, with orange alerts for Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Chandigarh and a yellow alert for Delhi and several eastern and northeastern states, according to the IMD.
- Visibility outages disrupted transport, delaying more than 20 trains in Ludhiana and forcing one international and three domestic flight diversions at Amritsar, where departures paused until 11:30 am.
- Air quality deteriorated across the National Capital Region, with Noida (AQI 409) and Ghaziabad (404) in the ‘severe’ bracket and Delhi near that threshold; GRAP Stages 1–3 remain in force and forecasts point to several days of ‘very poor’ air.
- Kashmir stayed below freezing with Sonamarg at minus 5.8°C, while the cold tightened in other regions—Karauli in Rajasthan fell to 3.1°C, Gumla in Jharkhand to 3.6°C, Koraput in Odisha to 4.8°C—and Kolkata logged its season’s lowest near 12.8–12.9°C.
- The IMD expects generally dry weather in many plains through December 29 before light to moderate rain or snow is likely from December 30 to January 1 in the western Himalaya; officials issued travel and health advisories, and police reported a suffocation death cluster in Bihar’s Saran during the cold.