The standing water and excess soil moisture had good and bad consequences. Pakistan has two main growing seasons, with farmers typically growing cotton and rice from May to November Kharif season and wheat from November to May Rabi season.
The excessively wet conditions also delayed the planting of wheat in some areas, but Pakistani farmers were able to extend cotton harvesting later in the growing season. In areas where the floods receded, Pakistanis were quick to plant crops. These rice fields in Sindh Province were almost ready for harvest on December 7, This lessens the blow to national food security. He also worries about where flood survivors will find materials to rebuild. But in many cases, citizens scrambling to build rudimentary shelter were forced to use inferior materials, meaning they now live in houses even more vulnerable to disaster.
In early , flood waters had receded considerably, though some areas remained submerged. In March, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that standing water prevented many families from returning to their homes in parts of Sindh and Balochistan Provinces. Even in places where waters had completely receded, people returned not to homes and fields, but to places where those things used to be.
The losses left children especially vulnerable. In February , UNICEF helicopters delivered clothes, blankets, and nutritional supplements to northwestern Pakistan amid harsh winter conditions, as damage from the flood and the earthquake had left many areas inaccessible by any other means. Meanwhile, the World Food Programme delivered food to an estimated 4. Although the floods in Pakistan were an unprecedented human tragedy, floods of similar extent have occurred in the past along the Indus.
This photograph shows sand deposited by previous monsoon floods near Thatta, in southern Pakistan. Massive floods may seem rare on human time scales, but not on the geological calendar, notes Clift. He has studied the Asian monsoon and its history near the Indus, where he has uncovered buried layers of sandy sediment that was deposited by ancient floods. Atmosphere Land. EO Explorer. At the time of publication, it represented the best available science.
Design by Robert Simmon April 6, Animations Web resolution 6. Human Factors The heavy, persistent rain would have been a challenge for Pakistanis under any circumstance. When levees are built along the banks, the sediments get deposited on the riverbed, which gradually rises above the surrounding plains.
Not only does this enhance the flood risk, the levees standing as walls also make it difficult for the floodwater to return back into the channel once it has spilled over. The Aftermath The effects of the monsoon season in Pakistan were both immediate and lasting. Four months later, Pakistan still suffers from flooding.
Accessed February 3, Agence France-Presse. Up to six more months of Pakistan flood water: EU official. Ali, T. Analysis of myths and realities of deforestation in Northwest Pakistan: Implications for forestry extension. International Journal of Agriculture and Biology, 8 1 , — Allbritton, C. CBS News. Encyclopedia of the Nations. Pakistan — agriculture. International Development Research Centre. Lahiri-Dutt, K. Special essay: Pakistan floods.
Global Water Forum. The following day NDMA reported several people were injured after heavy rain and floods caused a house to collapse in Kasur District of Punjab Province.
This total includes 86 fatalities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 53 in Punjab Province and 24 in Balochistan. A total of houses have been destroyed, with of them in Sindh and 45 in Balochistan.
Furthermore 13 roads and 9 bridges have suffered severe damage. Urban flooding in parts of Karachi as torrential downpour batters the city. Pakweather karachirain KarachiWeather KarachiRains pic.
If the industrialized world is to blame for pumping heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, Pakistanis are also at fault for eroding their country's ability to cope with the consequences. Final cries of the unrecorded dead Shehryar Shah, station manager at His news and talk station was virtually alone in covering the onset of the flooding as national media attention was fixated on a crash that same day of an Airblue passenger plane in the Margalla Hills, just north of Islamabad.
One of his most painful memories involves a caller indicating that there were about people stuck on rooftops in one part of town waiting for help, calling again and again when no one came.
Their cell phone was off," Shah said, distraught. He described rushing floodwaters up to 20 feet deep in some places. The storm grounded army rescue helicopters for at least two days. The last time his town was hit by such devastation was in , but even then, the extent of flooding was much lighter, nothing like that seen this summer, he insists.
What Shah and the citizens of Nowshera and Charsadda witnessed in those days was a perfect storm event never before seen in Pakistan's history. Government officials say that from July 28 to Aug. The province normally averages slightly above 3 feet for an entire year. The northern section of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa usually sees scattered rains during the monsoon season, but never the deluge it had this year.
The inundation even spread as far north as Gilgit and Skardu in Pakistani-administered Kashmir, a mountainous region that had never seen the monsoons. Development Programme who is now leading flood recovery efforts in Gilgit. Monsoons shift away from normal watersheds Pakistan's monsoon rains normally emanate from moisture swept in over India from the Bay of Bengal.
In typical years, the rains open up in the east, centered on Punjab province, roughly near the cities of Lahore and Faisalabad. Experts say the rains then migrate northwest, dissipating by the time they reach the capital, Islamabad, and ending in scattered rains before dying out in Afghanistan. Isolated flooding incidents occur every year, but Punjab is normally capable of absorbing the monsoon rains. The densely populated province is home to four major rivers that eventually drain into the Indus River, the nation's largest.
Punjab is also home to an intricate network of irrigation and water management systems designed for crop use, energy production and flood control. But for the past few decades, PMD officials have noticed that the center of Pakistan's monsoon has been gradually shifting to the northwest, away from the nation's watershed in Punjab.
Whereas flat Punjab is home to long, winding river systems capable of absorbing enormous quantities of water, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Federally Administered Tribal Areas on the Afghan border generate relatively shorter and narrow rivers cascading from the mountains that cover roughly half the region. Its main focus has changed from the eastern parts to the western parts. The same trend occurred again this year, only farther northwest than ever before, to lands with few major rivers to absorb rains but plenty of vertical surface area to collect water and sweep it downstream.
From Lahore and Faisalabad in the east, this year the center and start of Pakistan's monsoon season became instead Nowshera and Charsadda. And like the fabled "perfect storm" of North Atlantic lore, those monsoon rains eventually collided into two other atmospheric anomalies happening at the same time, creating a perfect storm of their own.
As the monsoons were headed for Pakistan's northwest, from July 25 to Aug. This buckling of the jet stream dragged with it a wave of low pressure from the west, a system PMD calls the "westerly wave. But it usually only comes that far south in the winter months -- in the summer, the normal pattern is for the westerly wave to track north of Afghanistan and miss Pakistan completely.
But because of the blockage of the jet stream's normal course, the westerly wave followed its winter trajectory in late July and early August instead, meeting the monsoon system at Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
A climate change-related mystery The cause of this blocking system in western China remains a mystery.
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