IMD Confirms Rare Cloudburst in Kalamassery, Kerala

The India Meteorological Department confirmed a cloudburst in Kalamassery, near Kochi, on May 28. Intense rainfall lasted an hour, causing significant flooding and disruptions. The Automatic Weather Station recorded 103 mm of rain in an hour. Historically, such events were undetected due to lack of observatories.

The India Meteorological Department (IMD) announced on Wednesday that the heavy rainfall event in Kalamassery near Kochi on May 28 was indeed a cloudburst.

The acute downpour, which persisted for an hour, resulted in substantial flooding across many regions of Kalamassery, crippling life in the bustling industrial area of Kerala.

According to IMD officials, the Automatic Weather Station at the Advanced Center for Atmospheric Radar Research (ACARR) on the CUSAT campus in Thrikkakara documented an extraordinary 103 mm of rain within just one hour. Another station, located barely a kilometre away in Kalamassery, recorded 100 mm of rain during the same timeframe from 9.30 AM to 10.30 AM.

By these reckoning, the IMD officially classified this heavy rainfall episode as a cloudburst.

Traditionally, cloudbursts have been associated with the hilly terrains of the Western Ghats, especially during active monsoon seasons. The IMD pointed out that due to historically limited observational infrastructure, many such phenomena went unnoticed and unrecorded.

Notably, a similar event was chronicled on March 26, 2010, when a Self-Recording Rain Gauge at the Meteorological Centre in Thiruvananthapuram logged 92 mm of rain in an hour. Hence, the recent incident in Kalamassery is far from unprecedented.

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