Kolkata Extreme Rainfall
IMD-recorded extreme rainfall events, 2020-2025
Kolkata floods from the sky, not from the river. The worst inundations of recent years followed intense local rain. On 23 September 2025, IMD recorded 251.4 mm at Alipore in 24 hours, and 234.2 mm of it fell in six hours overnight.
This page lists the extreme rainfall events for which the India Meteorological Department has published a Kolkata figure. It does not show river levels, because no official river-level series exists for the city.
About this data
What this page shows
Three extreme rainfall events in Kolkata, each with the rainfall figure IMD published for it: Cyclone Amphan (20 May 2020), Cyclone Dana (25-26 October 2024) and the overnight downpour of 22-23 September 2025. The measurement window is given for each event and is not the same for all three, so the totals should not be ranked against each other.
Where the data comes from
IMD press releases and bulletins: the RSMC New Delhi hourly bulletin of 20 May 2020 (Amphan), RSMC New Delhi Press Release 7 of 26 October 2024 (Dana) and the RMC Kolkata press release of 23 September 2025. The links are on each event card. Where a card also cites a news agency, the text says so.
Why there is no river-level chart
An earlier version of this page plotted Hooghly levels at Garden Reach against CWC warning and danger marks. Those values were not taken from any published source and have been removed. The Central Water Commission does not forecast levels at Kolkata or Garden Reach: its 12 level-forecast sites in West Bengal are all upstream or in north Bengal. Garden Reach is a port tide gauge. The port publishes predicted tides, and no public record of observed annual peaks or days above a warning level exists.
Limitations worth knowing
Three events are not a climatology. They are the cases with an IMD figure that could be checked. Alipore is a single station, and rainfall varies a lot across the city in a storm. Long-run rainfall trends are on the climate page.
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