MUMBAI: The very wet spell for the city continued with over 200mm rainfall recorded within a span of 36 hours ending on Tuesday afternoon. With this, Mumbai has received 69% of its annual July rain in just the first five days of the month.
The showers are unlikely to relent, with IMD issuing an orange alert (extremely heavy rain) for Mumbai and Thane for Thursday and Friday, and a red alert for Palghar and Raigad.
According to IMD, the city’s average rainfall for July stands at 855.7mm, of which almost 596mm has been received till Tuesday.
The intensity of Tuesday’s downpour was clearly evident in the rainfall recordings — in just six hours from 8.30am to 2.30pm, IMD’s Santacruz observatory recorded 115.3mm rain. And the Met department indicated the downpour was expected to continue. By 5.30pm, the rain gauge levels at Santacruz had touched 153.3mm; at IMD Colaba it was 48.6mm.
The intense rainfall over the past few days has wiped out the shortfall in June rain. IMD Santacruz’s total rainfall for the season now stands at 733mm, which is 13mm higher than the season’s average. The Colaba observatory is 48mm in the surplus.
In the 24 hours ending 8.30am on Tuesday, rainfall recorded by the IMD Colaba observatory was 117.4mm while IMD’s Santacruz observatory recorded 124.2mm.
Dr Jayanta Sarkar, scientist and head of the Regional Meteorological Centre, Mumbai, said such triple-digit rainfall is expected to continue in Mumbai over the coming days. “For Mumbai, we have already issued an orange alert for the next five days but we are watching it carefully and may upgrade it too,” he said. Raigad district has a red alert till the weekend and Palghar on Friday.
“The weather conditions currently are very active in the state. The reason is various favourable synoptic situations like a low pressure area whose latest location is central parts of Madhya Pradesh (as of Tuesday afternoon), an offshore trough from Gujarat coast to Maharashtra coast, and strong westerly winds. We expect widespread rain in the entire state for the next five days, and especially scattered places could see heavy to very heavy rain and isolated places could see extremely heavy rain. Raigad and Ratnagiri, especially, are very vulnerable and we have issued a red alert for these for the coming days,” said Sarkar.
IMD had declared the onset of monsoon on time on June 11 this year and pre-monsoon showers began encouragingly around June 9. However, rain played largely truant for the rest of the month, and June eventually ended without meeting its rain target.
However, the wet spell that started last week has sustained so far.
