SPECIAL REPORT ISLAMABAD: Last year's disastrous floods in Pakistan could have been minimised had European weather monitors shared their data and it had been properly processed, US researchers said in a report released here last week.
These devastated floods had swept through the country in July and August killing thousands, affecting 20 million people, destroying 1.7 million homes and damaging 5.4 million acres of arable lands.
“This disaster could have been minimised and even the flooding could have been minimised,” said lead author Peter Webster, a professor of earth and atmospheric science at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
“If we were working with Pakistan, they would have known eight to 10 days in advance that the floods were coming.” Using data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF), Webster and colleagues found the floods could have been predicted if the data 'had been processed and fed into a hydrological model, which takes terrain into account.'
He said, "People don't understand the powers of modern environmental prediction."
"We noticed that the signal was there five days in advance," Webster recalls. However, the lack of a cooperating agreement between the forecasting center and Pakistan meant that these rainfall warnings didn't make it to the Pakistani people, nor did Pakistan's own meteorological agency forecast the flooding.
In their research, the Georgia Tech meteorologists use data from the European centre to analyze whether or not the rainfall was above average for Pakistan and if the huge surges in the Indus River would have been predictable if flood forecasters were monitoring the country. They determine that, while the rainfall total for 2010 was slightly above average for the region, the July deluges were exceptionally rare, with rainfall amounts exceeding 10 times the average daily monsoon rainfall. They also find that if a flood forecasting model had been in place, the floods would have been predicted in time to issue warnings.
As a result of processing the raw output from ECMWF models from before the Pakistani deluge, the team achieves greater accuracy than the raw numerical forecasts alone provided. Some weather stations in Pakistan recorded nearly a foot (30 centimeters) of rainfall during the 4-day downpour. The after-the-fact predictions by Webster and his colleagues came in slightly below those amounts at the same locations.
Webster says that processing raw data into weather forecasts and combining them with hydrological models is only half the work.
These revelations have sprung a wave of concern for lacking coordination between the Pakistan Met Office and the foreign weather experts as well as weather monitors. They suggest to have a strong liaison in future in this regard so that the huge losses the country had born last year due to the heavy floods could be minimized in case of recurrence of this natural disaster in future.
http://www.technologytimes.pk/mag/2011/feb11/issue01/early_warning_could_have.php
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