A Brief History
On July 26, 2005, Mumbai, India, received an incredible 39.17 inches of rain in a 24 hour period. Mumbai is the most populous city in what is now the most populous country in the world, with 12.5 million inhabitants. Obviously, such an enormous amount of rain created massive flooding, and sadly about 1100 people died in the floods.
Digging Deeper
To put this enormous amount of rain in perspective, Cleveland, Ohio, a typical US city, has a record 24 hour rainfall of just 4.59 inches on September 7, 1996. The contiguous states US record for a single day’s rain is a massive 42 inches on July 25-26, 1979, in Alvin, Texas. The island of Kauai, Hawaii got soaked with 49.69 inches of rain in a day in 2018.
Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean holds the world record 24 hour rainfall, with a mind numbing 71.8 inches on January 7-8, 1966!
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
O’Connell, Bailey. Earth’s Rainiest Places. Gareth Stevens Pub, 2014.
Sharma, Shalu. Travel Mumbai: Places to Visit in Mumbai: Mumbai Travel Guide. Kindle, 2016.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by Bhadani at the English-language Wikipedia of Powai Lake, Mumbai on the verge of overflowing, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Subject to disclaimers.
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