A jawan on guard in the fog at India Gate on Monday. (PTI)

New Delhi, Nov. 21: A haze of air pollution intensified by the absence of winds hung over much of northern India today, taking over from what appeared to be the beginning of the winter fog season over the weekend, meteorologists said.

Weather scientists had attributed the low visibility over parts of eastern Uttar Pradesh on Saturday which extended into western Uttar Pradesh on Sunday to a combination of fog and haze, but neither temperatures nor moisture conditions today were favourable for fog.

“The moisture in the atmosphere today has decreased by about 10 per cent, and temperature was about 14°C — these are not ideal fog conditions,” said Rajendra Kumar Jenamani, a senior scientist with the fog forecasting division at the India Meteorological Department.

“What we’re seeing today could be a build-up of pollution from emissions across northern India,” Jenamani told The Telegraph. “We haven’t had winds over the region over the past 72 hours —without wind, the haze just piles up.” Weather stations in Patna, Lucknow, Delhi, Agra, and Amritsar reported the haze, he said.

Air quality monitoring figures from pollution control authorities suggest that the concentrations of particles of 10 microns (millionths of a metre) size in the capital’s air ranged from 708 micrograms per cubic metre to 999 micrograms per cubic metre over the past 24 hours. The prescribed limit is 100 micrograms per cubic metre.

The concentration of even smaller particles of size 2.5 microns — which can penetrate deeper into the lungs — over a vast Delhi residential area dominated by central government quarters ranged from 257 micrograms per cubic metre to 462 micrograms per cubic metre — four to seven times higher than the prescribed limit.

“We’ve had a relatively stable atmopshere — we haven’t had a western disturbance (atmospheric storms that move over India from central Asia) which could have brought wind and rain and helped disperse the pollution,” Jenamani said.

The IMD has said that over the next 48 hours, fog is expected to build up over parts of Delhi, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh, eastern Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar. Over the past two days, fog had reduced visibility to 200 metres over several towns, including Delhi, Meerut, Aligarh, Agra, Gwalior, Lucknow, Kanpur, and Patna.