Babatpur Stays Misty Through Monday; Tuesday Morning Opens With Thick Mist

Lal Bahadur Shastri Airport’s METAR sheet kept mist and haze in the frame from Monday into Tuesday morning, with Tuesday’s early readings dropping visibility toward 1.8 kilometres.

On Monday 21 September, VEBN observations showed a familiar late-monsoon pattern. Morning reports around 9 am IST listed 28°C with mist, visibility about 2.5 km, and cloud stacked as scattered around 2,000 feet with a broken higher layer. By early afternoon the temperature had climbed near 32°C under haze or mist, with easterly winds around 6 knots and visibility still mostly between 3 and 4 km. Evening METARs settled back to calm conditions, temperatures near 27–28°C, and mist holding visibility around 2.5 to 3 km.

Tuesday’s pre-dawn and early-morning sequence was thicker. Between roughly 5.30 am and 8 am IST the airport logged 27–29°C, dew points in the mid-to-high 20s, and mist with visibility oscillating from about 1.8 km up to 2.5 km. Cloud was mostly few at 10,000 feet. Pressure sat near 1007–1009 hPa. A becoming group on one morning report pointed toward 3 km in mist later — a modest improvement, not a clear-out.

These numbers come from the official VEBN half-hourly and hourly METARs redistributed by the Aviation Weather Center. They describe the instruments at Babatpur, a short drive from the Cantonment–city corridor, and remain the cleanest continuous official feed when city observatory pages are thin or delayed.

Compared with Sunday’s airport log already on the Dalimss record — a warm day with a brief afternoon rain — Monday was drier but still murky, and Tuesday opened softer still. Commuters on the airport road will recognise the damp air and shortened sightlines; pilots file the same mist groups that drivers feel as a grey wall beyond the truck lane.

METARs are observations, not a district forecast. They do not say what Thursday or Friday will bring. For that, the India Meteorological Department’s subdivision warnings are the better product. What the VEBN sheet does confirm is that Varanasi’s working week began under mist rather than under a hard blue sky, with Monday’s peak near 32°C and Tuesday’s dawn closer to a 2-kilometre curtain.

Anyone with an early flight or a long road run toward Babatpur should treat the morning mist groups as the operative picture until later METARs show a clear rise in visibility. Farmers and outdoor contractors watching late monsoon humidity will see the same theme in the dew-point numbers sitting only a degree or two below the air temperature.

Pressure readings near 1007–1009 hPa and light or variable winds fit a moist, settled boundary layer rather than a strong monsoon surge. If afternoon heating punches through the mist later on Tuesday, visibility may lift even while humidity stays high — a pattern Babatpur often shows between dawn METARs and the warmer midday groups.