the.com/cloudburst
a sky that loses its composure all at once, drowning towns in minutes
means A cloudburst is a sudden, intense downpour of rain over a small area in a short span of time, often heavy enough to cause flash flooding.
from A plain English compound of 'cloud' and 'burst,' built on the old folk image of a cloud as a swollen waterskin that splits and spills its load all at once. 'Cloud' comes from Old English 'clud,' which oddly first meant a mass of rock or a hill — a lump in the sky and a lump on the ground sharing one word — while 'burst' descends from Old English 'berstan,' to break suddenly. The picture of a literally bursting cloud is poetic rather than meteorological, but it's stuck around for centuries.
- Official rate
- 100mm of rain in one hour or less
- Mountain trap
- warm air rams slopes, dumps rain explosively
- Flash flood
- can fill dry canyons into killer torrents fast
- Word origin
- once meant clouds literally bursting like balloons
- Leh disaster
- 2010 cloudburst killed hundreds in Indian Himalayas
delhi cloudburst july 2023 — 47 deaths in one hour, deadliest in delhi in 30 years