The flash floods in Jammu and Kashmir's Kishtwar and Uttarakhand's Dharali remain unexplained, with no concrete evidence of cloudbursts or glacial lake breaches.
Meteorological data is sparse, and experts are divided on the causes, highlighting the challenges of weather monitoring in the Western Himalayas.
The reasons as to why a flash flood took place in Chashoti village of Jammu and Kashmir’s Kishtwar district are still a mystery, on the lines of what happened further southeast in the Western Himalayas in Uttarakhand’s Dharali.
There is no weather monitoring centre in Chashoti. There is thus no data available about how much rain fell there during the incident. Only five millimetres of rain fell in Kishtwar on August 15, 2025, according to the district-wise data released by the Meteorological Centre in Srinagar. There was no rain at all on August 14.
Some media reports quoting Mukhtiar Ahmed, director of the Meteorological Centre, Srinagar, said while there is no weather monitoring station in Chashoti, satellite and Doppler radar have detected heavy rainfall there.
Ahmed added that the upper reaches of Chashoti are connected to Ladakh’s Zanskar. So, it is possible that some glacier or glacial lake may have broken, which may have taken the form of a flood.
Similar things were being said after the flash flood in Dharali in Uttarkashi, but no concrete scientific evidence has been found so far. After claims of a glacier lake above Dharali breaking and causing a mudslide in the Kheer Ganga (or Kheer Gad) surfaced, Down to Earth (DTE) turned to the glaciology department at the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology in Dehradun, which monitors the Himalayas. A senior scientist of the department refused to comment, saying that until concrete evidence (satellite data) is not found, he cannot say anything.
DTE spoke to Mohammad Hussain Mir, the duty officer at the Meteorological Centre in Srinagar. He said such a disaster cannot happen without a cloudburst. However, he admitted that not much rain was recorded at the nearby observatory (weather monitoring centre) in Pahalgam. The aerial distance from Chashoti to Pahalgam is four kilometres, Mir said.
He added, “Let us first understand a cloudburst. In plain areas, it is possible that heavy rains are recorded simultaneously in a radius of several kilometres. But in the mountains, the situation is completely different. Here, it is also possible that it rains in one part and not in the other.”
According to Mir, “In the mountains, a nullah-like structure is formed wherever two peaks meet. It also has a natural gradient. Winds coming from two different directions can get trapped in this confluence zone. They get extended vertically, which can be up to four, five, six, eight kilometres.”
If this pattern of wind remains in place for half an hour, there is a 100 per cent chance that there will be so much air pressure accumulated at one place that it will become saturated, super saturated (heavy to very heavy) and when it is unable to bear its own weight due to moisture, all the water will fall at that particular location measuring not more than 50 square metres, said Mir.
He added that this would mean that if there is an observatory half a kilometre away, it would say that there has not been so much rain in the area.
However, Anand Sharma, the current president of the Indian Meteorological Society and retired additional director general of the India Meteorological Department, completely rejected Mir’s statement and said rain-bearing clouds cannot measure 50-100 metres. These clouds are 15 kilometres above and their range is very large. They are 15-20-25 kilometres long and wide, he said.
Sharma added that it is necessary to examine as to how much rain has fallen in the catchment area of the place where the flood or flash flood has occurred. “We have to go up to Dharali and see if there was a lot of water in any tributary of the Kheer Ganga, which got into it. Just like it meets Bhagirathi, other streams must also be joining it. We have to see if there was a lot of rain in their catchment area, due to which it overflowed.”