Flood-stricken Pakistan seeks to improve weather forecasts

Saleem Shaikh and Sughra Tunio in AlertNet: ...Pakistani meteorologists say climate change is making the annual monsoon rains increasingly erratic and hard to predict. In response, government agencies are using aid from Japan and international organisations to acquire advanced weather forecasting technology to improve their forecasts.

Rice, cotton, sugar and vegetable crops have been damaged or lost and transport disrupted, reducing supplies to local food markets and pushing up prices by as much as 150 percent.  NDMA officials say the rain and flooding damaged some 400,000 houses in 15,500 villages. 

Across Pakistan, devastating floods in 2010 caused crop and other infrastructure damage amounting to over 800 billion rupees ($84 million), while floods in 2011 cost the national economy an estimated 600 billion rupees ($63 million), according to the federal finance ministry.

This year’s monsoon rain was even more intense in some places. The Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) in Islamabad said that on Sept. 11 Jacobabad district had 380 mm (15 inches) of rain in 24 hours, the heaviest downpour for more than a century....

A June 2011 flood in Layyah, in Sindh, shot by Nadir.baloach, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license