What counts as a cloudburst? India lacks a clear answer

Anyone who has followed news coverage of the monsoon this year would likely assume that several cloudbursts have lashed the Himalayan region. According to media reports, for instance, on just July 1, ten different cloudbursts took place in Himachal Pradesh’s Mandi district, which killed 13 people.

Early this week, too, Dehradun woke up to submerged homes and destroyed roads – the damage had been caused by cloudbursts the night before, news outlets reported. Even the devastating flash flood in Uttarakhand’s Dharali in August that left over 40 missing was initially reported as being a result of a cloudburst.

But officially there is no consensus on whether these events were indeed cloudbursts.

This year, for instance, reports issued by Himachal Pradesh’s state disaster management authorities note that the state experienced 17 cloudbursts between June and September 17.

But when Scroll spoke with officials from regional centres of the Indian Meteorological Department in Shimla and Dehradun, they said that the centres had not recorded a single cloudburst event this monsoon.

What explains this discrepancy?

Interviews with meteorological department and disaster management authority officials revealed that it is a result of the fact that the two use different approaches to classify a heavy-rain event as a cloudburst.

While the meteorological department declares a cloudburst to have occurred when a particular weather...

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