Himalayan "cloudburst"

[Jason Harris]

Described as a "cloudburst," but no specific mention of downdraft winds being part of the damage. Anyone know any more about this? And what were the rainfall rates? ah, it's in mm:
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The rate of rainfall may be of the order of 100mm per hour.
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So, that's about 4 inches/hour.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19323-fatal-cloudburst-devastates-himalayan-desert-town.html

here's their weather service pdf download:

http://www.imd.gov.in/doc/cloud-burst-over-leh.pdf

 

[Rebekah LaBar]

I'd never heard of a cloudburst before, but I looked it up and the word's in the AMS Glossary:

cloudburst--(Also called rain gush, rain gust.) In popular terminology, any sudden and heavy fall of rain, almost always of the shower type.
An unofficial criterion sometimes used specifies a rate of fall equal to or greater than 100 mm (3.94 inches) per hour.

Wikipedia also has an article for cloudbursts.

I was rather amused that the article you cited mentioned global warming...

Climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict that the number of extreme events such as cloudbursts will increase with rising global temperature[...]. But [a climate scientist] adds that there is not enough evidence to pin the Leh cloudburst on global warming.

Here's another article I found when I googled the event--the title alone should give you a laugh: "No Concrete Proof To Pin Leh Cloudburst On Global Warming", from the Times of India.

But I always thought that any single event these days could be attributed to global warming...

Sounds like over 100 people were killed in the subsequent flash floods and mudslides.

 

[Paul Knightley]

'Cloudburst' is just, I think, a colloquial term for describing torrential rain. It's been used in the UK for several centuries when describing such things, although not as an official term.

 

[MJ Poore]

Looks like a case of flash flooding. Causes havoc in dry regions because all the water has no where to go, and the hard ground doesnt absorb it either. Some parts of the world get this sort of thing regularly where you have a desert close to a warm ocean. It's usually isolated incidents over a wide area. Very hard for scientists to predict. Country's like the US build large concrete drainage canals to contain potential events like this.