What is cloud burst : Leh cloudburst

Contrary to popular perception, the unprecedented cloudburst did not trigger flood. Mountains in the dry, cold desert of Ladakh are made of rocks stuck in loose, sandy formations. Concentrated rains, thus, immediately turn them into mortar which then slithers down as a rumbling mass of cold lava and obliterates anything that comes in its way. Once the mass settles after exhausting its momentum, the water locked in the mortar and blocked behind the mass breaks free into gushing streams.
Maharashtra CM Ashok Chavan on Saturday called Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and expressed grief on loss of lives in the Leh cloudburst. Chavan rang up Abdullah and offered all possible help from Maharashtra after more than 100 were killed in the incident, an official said.
Sudden overnight rains caused flash floods in the town of Leh, the administrative center of the mountainous northern Ladakh region that borders China and Pakistan, killing more than 100 people and leaving hundreds injured. Many news reports described the downpour as a “cloudburst,” which the Indian Meteorological Department described Friday evening as a “disastrous weather event” in which “rate of rainfall may be of the order of 100mm [millimeters] per hour.”
Rainfall is very, very scarce in the Ladakh region—it’s a dry, high-altitude region—so when it does happen it causes havoc because the houses and towns aren’t designed to deal with it. We were curious to find out exactly how much it had rained in millimeters, and whether this was typical for this time of year (it is monsoon season in India from June through September) and none of the day news stories carried the amount of rainfall.