So it is “well known” that whenever it rains heavily in Bangalore, the city cools down like crazy. However, all these days, thanks to dodgy data from the Met department, it’s just been an (multiple) anecdotal observation, and not really backed by data.
However, thanks to the efforts of Pavan and Saurabh and the Yuktix team, we have “citizen weather monitoring centres” in several places across Bangalore. These are simple devices that have been installed on terraces or gardens of people, and they contain a rain gauge, a hygrometer, a thermometer and a wind gauge (or whatever it is that measures wind). And they have an embedded SIM card and transmit data every few minutes to the central server (for all you VCs, this is both “cloud-based” and “Internet of things”, so fund them already!).
The web interface isn’t great yet, and the data download is a bit dodgy, but hey, it works for now and we have actual data to show the weather conditions in Bangalore. And there are several stations all over the city (all installed by volunteers who have paid to have one such device in their homes. If you are interested, you can get one, too. Contact Pavan for this), so we can actually test popular hypothesis like how it can rain in one part of Bangalore and not in the other, etc.
Anyway, given the dodgy interface I’m unable plug a weather widget here (how cool would that have been?) so I’ve to shamelessly take screenshots and paste it. This one shows the temperature as measured by the device in Pavan’s house in 4th T Block (the station closest to my home) in the last one week:
Notice the nice sawtooth pattern of Bangalroe summer temperature. Temperatures rise steadily till about 2:30 pm and then fall steadily (but at a lower rate) till about 5:30 am. It is rather steady and repetitive as the graph shows. And then look at what happened yesterday! A steep plunge between 4:30 and 6:30 pm yesterday, and remember that the hailstorm started around 6!
I’ve noticed this on other days also (again by looking at Pavan’s data), and the same pattern holds. The hypothesis that rains do have an instant effect on the city’s temperature definitely holds!
For more interactivity with the data, you can check out Pavan’s station. Or whichever station that is closest to where you are! if there is none close to where you are, maybe it’s time for you to set up one such station!