Karachi Weather & Live Heat, Cyclone & Flood Map

Karachi is one of the largest cities in the world, a sprawling port metropolis on Pakistan's Arabian Sea coast — and it lives with a difficult trio of hazards that take turns through the year. There's the humid heat that has proved deadly on a mass scale, the rare but serious cyclones that spin up over the Arabian Sea, and the monsoon rains that flood a low-lying, densely packed city. Knowing which is in play, and which layer to watch, is exactly what the live map helps with.

Heat that the humidity makes lethal

Karachi's most dangerous hazard is heat — but not the dry desert kind. Because the city sits right on the Arabian Sea, its heat arrives laced with humidity, and that combination is what makes it so deadly. When the air is hot and saturated, sweat can't evaporate, and evaporation is how the body sheds heat. The result is that the body can be overwhelmed at temperatures a dry inland city would tolerate.

The danger isn't theoretical. A severe heatwave in 2015 killed well over a thousand people in Karachi, with the toll worsened by power and water shortages during the fasting month, when many were unable to cool down or rehydrate. It stands as one of the clearest modern examples of how humid coastal heat can become a mass-casualty event — the very dynamic the wet-bulb guide explains.

Cyclones from the Arabian Sea

Karachi's second hazard comes off the water. The Arabian Sea produces tropical cyclones, chiefly in the windows before and after the summer monsoon. Direct hits on the city are relatively rare, but storms periodically track toward the coast and force large-scale preparations — and a cyclone bearing down on Karachi threatens damaging winds, torrential rain and storm surge along the low-lying shoreline. Because these storms can intensify over warm seas, an approaching system is watched closely. Their rarity is part of what makes a genuine cyclone threat such a significant event when it arrives.

Monsoon floods

The third hazard is water from above. The summer monsoon can deliver intense bursts of rain, and Karachi — vast, dense and low-lying — has limited drainage to cope. When a heavy monsoon spell hits, the water rapidly overwhelms the system and floods streets and neighbourhoods. Record monsoon rains have paralysed the city, turning major thoroughfares into rivers and stranding residents. Managing the monsoon's floodwater is one of Karachi's defining seasonal struggles, and the radar is the layer to watch through those months.

Reading it on the live map

Karachi's hazards rotate through the year, so the key layer rotates too:

• Gauge the heat. Turn on Temperature to follow the humid heat — remembering that the humidity, not just the number, sets the real danger.
• Watch for cyclones. When an Arabian Sea system is brewing, the Hurricanes layer tracks its path and approach to the coast.
• Follow the floods. In the monsoon, switch to Radar to see where the heaviest rain — and flood risk — is concentrated.
• Connect the threads. The wet-bulb guide explains why the heat is so dangerous, and the rapid-intensification and storm-surge guides cover the cyclone threat from the sea.

Temperature tells you when the heat is the killer, the hurricane layer tells you when the sea is the threat, and radar tells you when the floods are coming. In a coastal megacity that faces danger from heat, sea and sky in turn, reading the right layer for the season is how Karachi stays ahead of it.