At 480mm Mahabaleshwar gets highest daily July rainfall

With extremely heavy rains lashing southern reaches of the Konkan coast and central Maharashtra on Thursday, the hill station of Mahabaleshwar (in Satara district) received its highest ever quantum of daily rainfall in July, at a whopping 480mm in the 24 hours, ending 8:30am on Thursday — breaking the previous record for of 439

With extremely heavy rains lashing southern reaches of the Konkan coast and central Maharashtra on Thursday, the hill station of Mahabaleshwar (in Satara district) received its highest ever quantum of daily rainfall in July, at a whopping 480mm in the 24 hours, ending 8:30am on Thursday — breaking the previous record for of 439.8mm (on July 7, 1977).

HT Image

Other hill stations too recorded extremely heavy rain (above 204.5mm over the course of a day), with Matheran (in Raigad district) notching up 331mm of rain and Lonavala (in Pune district) clocking a total 313mm of rain.

The downpour led to severe flooding or waterlogging in parts of Ratnagiri, Raigad, Satara and Kohlapur, and had been foreseen by the India Meteorological Department (IMD) a day prior. These districts had been placed under a ‘red’ category storm warning alert, indicating a high possibility of severe weather. IMD had particularly warned of “extremely heavy rainfall likely at isolated places in ghat areas.”

“Friday and Saturday are days to watch in these districts, even though they have been placed under an orange category alert. We expect that the intensity of rains will start decreasing from Friday, but doppler radar images from Thursday evening showed very intense rain bands over the western ghats and there is a chance of further heavy spells during the night,” said a spokesperson with IMD’s Pune office on Thursday.

Dr J R Kulkarni, a retired meteorologist with the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, said, “The intensity of the rain would have been compounded by the orographic effect of the western ghats. Since the Mahabaleshwar area is also the source of the Krishna river and feeds a lot of the channels that flow toward the windward side of the ghats, the runoff would have, no doubt, driven flooding in some of the low-lying areas along the west coast, as well as on the leeward side in places like Satara and Kohlapur.”

Kulkarni added that 480mm of rain in a day for Mahabaleshwar is alarming, and certainly bears a strong signature of climate change, but at the same time is not surprising or unusual for the area. He, along with other independent meteorologists HT spoke with, said that forecasting the distribution and intensity of rains in the Western Ghats is far trickier owing to the landscape than in coastal areas.

“You see the same problem in the Himalayan foothills, for example. 480mm of rain in a single day in a place like Mahabaleshwar is indeed very hard to predict,” added Akshay Deoras, independent meteorologist and PhD researcher with the University of Reading, UK.

With the average total rainfall (from June 1) standing at 2032.7mm, the Konkan and Goa meteorological sub-division are currently the wettest in the entire country, in absolute terms. The rainfall amount is 45% above the normal up to July 22, which is 1402.7mm. Just this month alone, Konkan and Goa have together recorded an average rainfall amount 1191.9mm, which is 60% above the normal up to July 22, which comes to 747.2mm.