After heavy rains lashed Telangana, leading to flooding in parts of Bhadrachalam, Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar RAO visited the area for flood relief. While there, he said, "A new thing called a cloudburst has come up. I don't know how far it is correct. Someone who have enmity are doing cloudburst in our country. In the past, they did it near Kashmir, L eh, Ladakh, then in Uttarakhand, and now we are getting reports that they are doing it in the Godavari region."
Telangana has been witnessing a flood-like situation due to heavy rainfall, and it has caused inundation in several areas. Heavy rains lashed Telangana for about seven days and has caused severe damage to agricultural crops.
But what is a cloudburst that the Telangana CM is convinced is a "foreign conspiracy"?
According to the India Meteorological Department's website, an event of extremely heavy rainfall is determined as a cloudburst when "10 cm rainfall is receiving at a station in one hour."
India Meteorological Department director-general Mrutunjay Mohapatra, while speaking at an event, explained that "when warm monsoon winds interact with cold winds it leads to the formation of massive clouds, which is also due to the topography or holographic factors".
According to a report by the National Institute of Disaster Management on the 2013 Uttarakhand flash flood, cloudbursts can be accompanied by hail and thunderstorms.
Can cloud bursts be predicted?
Although it is difficult to forecast cloudbursts, doppler radars can be helpful in predicting them. A doppler radar is a specialised radar that uses the Doppler effect to produce velocity data about objects at a distance. It does this by bouncing a microwave signal off a desired target and analyzing how the object's motion has altered the frequency of the returned signal.
But not all of the Himalayas, where a cloud burst is most likely, has a Doppler radar. Earth sciences minister, Jitendra Singh in Lok Sabha on July 23 said that the Himalayan region has seven doppler radars — two in Jammu and Kashmir (Sonmarg and Srinagar), one each in Uttarakhand (Kufri), Mukteshwar (Uttarakhand), Mohanbari (Assam), Meghalaya (Sohri) and Tripura (Agartala). Mohapatra had earlier told India Today that there are only 34 radars present in the country as of now. The number has increased by just 6 in the last 5 years.
The IMD website also states that "it is very difficult to predict cloudbursts due to its very small scale in space and time. To monitor or now cast (forecasting few hours lead time) the cloudburst, we need to have dense radar network over the cloud burst prone areas or one need to have a very high resolution weather forecasting models to resolve the scale of cloudburst."
What happens during a cloudburst?
Cloudbursts happen when saturated clouds are unable to produce rain because of the upward movement of warm current of air. Instead of dropping, raindrops get bigger and get pushed up due to the air current. Eventually they become too heavy to hold and drop, leading to more rain than usual. There isn't a 'burst' in the literal sense, but an intense version of a torrential downpour that happens.
Here are some places that have experienced cloudbursts in India's recent past.
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