MP town in the plains freezes at minus 1 degree Celsius

BHOPAL: Residents of Nowgaon, a small town in Chhatarpur district of Madhya Pradesh, woke up to ice layers on their cars and gardens on Saturday morning as the temperature dropped to minus-1 degree Celsius.
Experts are puzzled by the freezing, sub-zero temperatures in a town in the heart of India and at an elevation of just 233 metres. The surrounding region – Nowgaon is close to the Uttar Pradesh border – are nowhere near as cold, deepening the mystery.
Met officials are considering examining their instruments to re-verify the record temperature, said to be the lowest in Madhya Pradesh in over two decades. The hill town of Pachmarhi and Gwalior are know to see temperatures in the zeros, but Nowgaon is a mystery. The joke is that the thermometer gets confused as peak summer is a searing 49 degrees here.
Instrument check in freezing Nowgaon
The town of less than a lakh population froze in its tracks as ice and hard frost – which townsfolk mistook for snow – covered everything. Schools have been closed. People were seen scooping up ‘snow’ off park benches, cars and grass, and playing with it as if they were in Manali. This, barely 68km from Khajuraho, and in a region where summers are usually 48-degrees-plus. “We were shivering, there was ice on the grass outside our house. I don’t remember seeing such conditions ever in my life,” said Jagdish Sahu, who has seen 80 winters.
Experts are now calling for a study to unveil the mystery behind Nowgaon’s extremes of temperature – the hottest and coldest town in the state. Presence of graphite in the area is considered as one of the reasons behind the “exceptional extremes”. Ved Prakash Singh, a scientist at Bhopal centre of India Meteorological Department, told TOI that instruments have to be examined to confirm whether temperature dipped to minus-1 degree in that place.