4 August 2010
3 August 2009
Flooding in North-Central Pakistan
Source: NASA Earth Observatory
Last week I published a brief posting on the weather extremes of 2010 and mentioned the catastrophic flooding in Pakistan. A couple of days ago one of my absolute favorite websites NASA Earth Observatory, from NASA Goddard Space Laboratory, published a photograph of 2010 flood conditions in north-central Pakistan with a comparison to a more normal monsoonal wet season in 2009. Large areas of green are visible on both photos, the growing vegetation associated with the wet part of the monsoon as summer rains break the months-long winter dry spell. The year 2009 was within normal rainfall expectations. There was some flooding of low lying areas, flooding anticipated annually, shown by the blue areas on the photographs. The difference in the amount of blue on the two photos gives an indication of the widespread flooding that has occurred as much heavier than normal monsoonal rain has fallen in the current rainy season.
The pulse of water from the rains is now pushing southward through the agricultural heartland of Pakistan toward Sindh. With advance warning, the loss of life in the south is likely to be small, but damage to roads, rail lines, towns and farms is inevitable. For presumably unrelated reasons the southern city of Karachi has recently suffered serious rioting. Economic displacements and flood refugees could make conditions in the already socially unstable city even more chaotic and difficult to control.
The pulse of water from the rains is now pushing southward through the agricultural heartland of Pakistan toward Sindh. With advance warning, the loss of life in the south is likely to be small, but damage to roads, rail lines, towns and farms is inevitable. For presumably unrelated reasons the southern city of Karachi has recently suffered serious rioting. Economic displacements and flood refugees could make conditions in the already socially unstable city even more chaotic and difficult to control.
Pakistan and India depend on monsoonal rains, the seasonal rainfall of mid and late summer, for virtually all of their rain-fed agriculture and much of the flow of major exotic rivers like the Indus and the Ganges. Years when monsoonal rains fail to arrive can portend great problems including the possibility of famine. A bitter irony is that excess rainfall can also cause great problems with many hundreds dead and vast damages to the agriculture and the economy. The current floods mark the second time in three years that excess rainfall has flooded large areas in Pakistan, for 2008 was also a year of flooding in the Indus Valley.
For anyone with an interest in the issue of flooding and drought in India and Pakistan, or water issues more generally, the NASA Earth Observatory site is strongly recommended both for its stunning photography (and mapping) from space data and also for its simple and clear explanations of the phenomena shown in the photographs. The current photograph of the day shows a failure of the Tempe, AZ town drain, a way of removing excess water in the occasional monsoonal flooding in the Arizona desert slurb. The southwestern United States and adjacent portions of México share with southern Asia a monsoonal climate!
For anyone with an interest in the issue of flooding and drought in India and Pakistan, or water issues more generally, the NASA Earth Observatory site is strongly recommended both for its stunning photography (and mapping) from space data and also for its simple and clear explanations of the phenomena shown in the photographs. The current photograph of the day shows a failure of the Tempe, AZ town drain, a way of removing excess water in the occasional monsoonal flooding in the Arizona desert slurb. The southwestern United States and adjacent portions of México share with southern Asia a monsoonal climate!
