A flash flood struck Chashoti village in Jammu and Kashmir’s Kishtwar district on August 15, 2025, but the cause remains unclear. What happened in Chashoti is drawing comparisons to a similar unexplained flood in Dharali, Uttarakhand, both in the Western Himalayas, both lacking clear scientific explanation.
Official data from the Meteorological Centre in Srinagar shows only 5 millimetres of rain fell in Kishtwar that day and none the day before. But Chashoti has no weather station of its own, leaving a critical data gap.
Despite the lack of local data, director Mukhtar Ahmed from the Meteorological Centre said satellite and Doppler radar picked up signs of heavy rainfall over Chashoti. Ahmed also pointed out that Chashoti’s upper reaches connect to Ladakh’s Zanskar region.
A possible glacier or glacial lake breach could have caused the sudden flooding. A similar theory emerged after the Dharali flash flood in Uttarakhand. Some claimed a glacial lake above Kheer Ganga burst, causing a mudslide. But scientists at the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology said there’s no satellite evidence to support that and declined to speculate further.
Mohammad Hussain Mir, the duty officer in Srinagar, suggested that such an event would typically require a cloudburst. But he acknowledged that the nearest observatory in Pahalgam, just 4 km away, recorded little to no rainfall.
Mir explained that in mountainous terrain, rain can be extremely localised. When winds from different directions get trapped in narrow valleys, they can rise vertically, forming a super-saturated cloud that releases intense rainfall over an area as small as 50 square metres.
But Anand Sharma, president of the Indian Meteorological Society and former senior official at the IMD, dismissed that explanation. He argued that rain-bearing clouds are far larger, spanning 15-25 kilometres and cannot produce rainfall in such tiny pockets. Sharma emphasised the need to study rainfall patterns across the entire catchment area. In places like Dharali or Chashoti, floodwaters could be the result of excess rain in distant tributaries, funneling into a narrow valley.