Though the Monday rains were supposed to be worse than Sunday as predicted by the weather department forecast, it did not rain enough to bring the city to a standstill. However, in merely 15 days of rainfall, the city has already received three-fourth of its ideal rainfall for the season. The cumulative rainfall in these 17 days is also the highest in over two decades.
From June 1 to June 17, at around 8.30 am this year, Colaba has recorded 748.9 mm of rainfall, while Santa Cruz has received 755.8 mm. Colaba has already covered 33.7 per cent of its annual average (2,220 mm), while
Santa Cruz has covered 29.1 per cent of its annual average (2,598 mm) rainfall.
Compared to previous years, the monsoon has been intensely active this year so far. But even in 2011, which was considered to be a good rainfall year, Colaba and Santa Cruz received 420 mm and 482 mm respectively in the first 16 days of June, even though monsoon was declared on June 5 in 2011. In the last 22 years, only 2003 had received more rainfall in the month of June than the city has received so far this year. However, the 783 mm of rainfall is the total monthly rainfall of the month of June. Which makes the city’s rainfall so far the highest since 1991, when the total monthly rainfall was 905 mm.
According to weather experts, the quality of the monsoon depends upon five to six climatic parameters. “Monsoon is a complicated global system, which depends upon parameters such as the jet stream effect or the Indian Ocean dipole effect. Sometimes even the El Nino affects the monsoon negatively,” said N.Y. Apte, deputy director general of Indian Meteorological Department (IMD), Mumbai.
Meanwhile, on Monday, IMD recorded a rainfall of 21.5 mm in Colaba and 14 mm in Santa Cruz. The forecast for Tuesday
said, “There will be intermittent rains and shower in city and suburbs and heavy rainfall in parts of city and suburbs.”