Fog cloaks Delhi, visibility drops to 400 metres

New Delhi: Dense fog engulfed the nation's capital today, affecting rail and road traffic.

With the visibility coming down to 400 metres, some flights to Chandigarh, Varanasi and Lucknow were either diverted or suspended, authorities said. However, operations at the Delhi airport remained normal, an official said.

A Railways spokesperson said around 18 trains are running late by one-and-a-half to five hours.

The Palam airport logged the lowest visibility level of 400 metres at 2.30 am. Visibility dropped to 500 metres at the Safdarjung airport at 5.30 am, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said.

According to the IMD, very dense fog is when visibility is between 0 and 50 metres, between 51 and 200 metres is dense fog, 201 and 500 metres is moderate fog, and 501 and 1,000 is shallow fog.

The Safdarjung Observatory, the primary weather station in Delhi, recorded a minimum temperature of 7.1 degrees Celsius, a notch below normal. The maximum temperature is likely to settle around 22 degrees Celsius, the IMD said.

The minimum and maximum temperatures are likely to drop to 5 degrees Celsius and 20 degrees Celsius in the next few days, it said.

On Tuesday, One person died and 24 were injured when a bus collided with a truck amid low visibility due to dense fog on the Yamuna Expressway in Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, police said.

In a separate incident, a truck loaded with lentils hit the divider of the highway and overturned in the Dadri area of Greater Noida, police said.

In view of reduced visibility due to increasing fog, the upper-speed limit on the Noida-Greater Noida Expressway has now been fixed at 75 km per hour from 100 km per hour, officials said on Tuesday evening.

The upper speed of vehicles has also been capped at 65 km per hour on some other routes in Noida, and motorists violating the speed limit order will face legal action or penalty or both, according to an official statement.

(With PTI inputs)