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In the end of August 2022 large parts of Pakistan was hit by extreme rainfall and severe flooding. The extreme rainfall seems also to have hit parts of Afghanistan.
Pakistan was devastated by widespread floods in end of August 2022. Since the beginning of the monsoon season in June a third of the country has been badly affected by floods that have killed more than 1000 people and displaced 33 million. There are several important aspect that have caused these devastating floods. First, Pakistan is a home of 221 million people and the majority of the population live along the Indus River, which flows from the Himalayas, through most of the country down to the Arabian Sea at Karachi. In the northern Himalayan regions of Pakistan there are more glaciers than anywhere else in the world outside the Arctic and Antarctic. Rising global temperatures are causing those glaciers to melt and form glacial lakes. Around 3,000 new lakes have formed, with officials warning 33 of them are currently at risk of bursting. Many already have so far this year. When the Shisper glacier burst in May, it released millions of cubic metres of water, causing landslides and creating a lake that destroyed a bridge, two power plants and hundreds of homes in the Hunza Valley. Due to glacier melting mentioned above and some episodes of heavy rain, river Indus is flowing full already from the north of the country but the southern provinces of Sindh and Balochistan are also suffering very extreme levels of rainfall – Sindh in the southeast has had 784% of its normal rainfall levels this year, while Balochistan in the southwest has had 522% (all these data has been reported in the media).
https://floodlist.com/asia/pakistan-floods-update-august-2022
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The plot below is the same as above but for the northern box.
Compared to the model climatology, the event was more extreme in the northern box, even if the absolute magnitude was less. For this 3-day period (23-25 Aug), the forecast s from for the southern box from around 12 August started to pick up the risk of a wet period, but the really strong signal appeared only 1-2 days before the event started. For the northern box, the signal increase more gradually since 11 August.
3.4 Monthly forecasts
The panels in the plot below show extended-range EFI/SOT valid for the week 22-29 August.
The plot below shows the weekly average precipitation in a box covering NW. India and Pakistan for summer 2022, in ERA5 and extended-range ensemble mean forecasts with different lead times valid for the same week. Also week 6 forecasts predicted on average a wetter-than-normal season, but only from week 2-3 and shorter the forecast captured the intra-seasonal variability.
3.5 Comparison with other centres
3.6 EFAS/GLOFAS
The plots below show GLOFAS output before the onset (20 August) of the floods (left) and after (29 August) the event (right). In the right plot the bottom panel is for the same point as in the left plot.
4. Experience from general performance/other cases
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