LAHORE, Jan 8: Biting cold and a thin layer of fog continued to haunt the city on Wednesday with the temperature dropping to a minimum of 4.5 degrees Celsius and the visibility reduced to 700 metres.

The meteorological office expects the fog layer to thicken in the morning and visibility to drop to 300 metres. The flight operations might also suffer late at night and early in the morning, when visibility was expected to drop to 500 metres. However, the airport operations were normal when this report was filed.

The Met officials expect the cold wave to continue for another two to three days.

The Met office forecast cold and dry weather with mist and fog in the morning for the next 24 hours.

About its earlier prediction of rain that failed to materialise, the Met office said that some clouds had been moving from Afghanistan to Pakistan, but they changed route at the last moment and diverted towards the mountains. They did affect the Northern Areas but never reached the plains.

Only the Malakand division of NWFP is expected to receive some rain during the next 24 hours, with dry weather prevailing in the rest of the country.