An early heat spell, a standing wheat crop and no rain since November
NOT SCRIPTED worked through the IMD's own outlook and the early-March temperature reports to size the exposure of the north Indian rabi crop to a hot start to March.
By NOT SCRIPTED Desk · Reference Desk, Archive
The short version
- Early-March reporting recorded 35.7°C in Delhi in the first week of the month and readings above 40°C in 14 cities.
- Western disturbances, the rain-bearing systems of the western Himalaya, have not been active since November 2025.
- The IMD forecast a fall of 2 to 4°C in the days immediately after the early-March peak.
The first week of March 2026 was hot well beyond what the calendar normally allows, and the heat arrived at the least forgiving point of the agricultural year. Reporting published in early March recorded a maximum of 35.7°C in Delhi, the warmest first week of the month in 15 years, and readings above 40°C in 14 cities across the country.
The compounding detail is the absence of rain. Western disturbances, the rain-bearing systems that travel across the western Himalaya in winter and spring, had not been active since November 2025. That removes the mechanism that would normally interrupt a warm spell, and it removes the supplementary irrigation that a rabi crop in the northern plains depends on.
- 35.7°C — maximum recorded in Delhi in the first week of March 2026
- 14 — cities reported above 40°C in the same early-March window
- 2 to 4°C — forecast fall in maximum temperatures in the days after the peak
- November 2025 — last active western disturbance before the March heat
The crop most exposed is wheat in the north, which by early March is past flowering and filling grain under a canopy that traps its own heat. Grain filling is the phase in which a plant converts water and temperature into yield, and it has no second attempt. A short, sharp spike matters less than the nights that follow it: when the maximum is high and the minimum does not recover, the plant keeps respiring through the night and the grain is filled thinner.
The near-term forecast offered relief, with an expected fall of 2 to 4°C in the days after the early-March peak. Relief in the maximum is not the same as relief for the crop: what matters from here is whether nights cool, whether a western disturbance finally forms, and whether the seasonal outlook holds when the summer proper arrives.
Sources — 2 references
These are the published sources this article was established against. NOT SCRIPTED wrote the text above; the sources below are credited to their own publishers.
NOT SCRIPTED independently compiled this from the IMD seasonal heatwave outlook for March to May 2026 as reported by The Hindustan Times on March 1, 2026, and from early-March temperature and western-disturbance reporting carried by Bhaskar English. The department's threshold definitions and seasonal framing were taken from the IMD material as published; no additional dataset, forecast model or interview was used.
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