Lal Bahadur Shastri Airport at Babatpur put up a classic late-monsoon Sunday: warm through the afternoon, a spell of light rain, and mist hanging on into Monday morning.
Half-hourly METARs filed under the VEBN code show the mercury nudging 33°C through the middle of the day on 20 September. Visibility sat mostly between 2.5 and 4 kilometres under haze or mist, with scattered to broken cloud around 2,000 feet and a higher broken layer. Winds were light easterlies for much of the morning and early afternoon.
Around 4.30 pm IST the sheet flipped to light rain. Temperature eased to 29°C, the wind picked up briefly with gusts near 19 knots, and mist returned once the shower passed. Through the evening the airport sat calm, still reporting about 2.5 km visibility in mist with a few clouds stacked above the field.
Monday’s first usable observations before 9 am IST kept the same theme. At 9 am the temperature was 28°C with dew point 26°C, wind from 100 degrees at 8 knots, visibility 2.5 km in mist, and cloud SCT020 BKN100. Pressure hovered near 1011 hPa. No significant change was noted in the short-term remark.
Those readings sit one step away from downtown Banaras, but they remain the standard aviation weather feed for the district.
Compared with Saturday’s dry city sheet, Sunday’s airport log is the fresher turn: a brief wet spell after a warm haze day, then a misty start to the working week. Commuters on the Cantonment–Babatpur stretch will recognise the pattern — damp air, soft visibility, and cloud that never quite clears before noon.
For the next few hours the METARs themselves are not a forecast product; they only describe what the instruments saw. What they do confirm is that Varanasi opened the week under low cloud and mist rather than under a hard clear sky, after a Sunday that mixed heat, haze and a short afternoon rain.
Farmers and outdoor contractors watching the late monsoon usually treat such a day as transitional. The airport’s Sunday peak near 33°C keeps the heat in the frame even as mist returns overnight. Anyone planning early flights or road runs toward the airport should expect the same reduced morning visibility that showed up in the 3 am to 9 am IST sequence.
The observations run through Monday morning IST and will be overtaken by later METARs as the day builds. Babatpur remains the clearest official window on how the weather actually behaved across the past twenty-four hours.
