Calcuttans can expect relief from the sweltering heat with the weather office predicting rain in the next 24 hours.

The temperature in the city dropped by a few degrees on Friday evening following trace (faint) rainfall in some parts and a Nor’wester in Nadia and Murshidabad.

“Conditions are now favourable for scattered rain and thundershowers in Calcutta and the rest of Gangetic Bengal,” said G.C. Debnath, the director of the weather section at Regional Meteorological Centre, Alipore.

The lack of rainfall over the past few days in Gangetic Bengal could have been a fallout of the “very severe” cyclonic storm Nargis that hit the Myanmarese coast on Friday evening, said an official. “But there was no direct impact of the formation on our weather.”

The storm hovered over the Bay of Bengal for the past five days and sucked in loads of moisture.

Met officials do not expect much rise in the maximum temperature on Saturday, thanks to a southerly wind that is blowing in moisture from the sea. The maximum temperature on Friday was 36.2 degrees Celsius (normal).

But there could be a change in the windflow pattern any time, pushing up the mercury. “A heat wave is sweeping Vidarbha, east Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Chandigarh and Delhi. There is a chance of the hot and dry wind from there blowing into the state,” a Met official said.

“There was lot of moisture in the lower levels of the atmosphere last week. But a cyclonic circulation over sub-Himalayan Bengal sucked in most of the moisture, resulting in rain in north Bengal,” said a Met official.