Pakistan floods could have been minimised: US team
February 1, 2011 by SAF Desk
WASHINGTON: Last year’s disastrous floods in Pakistan could have been minimised if European weather monitors had shared their data and it had been properly processed, US researchers said Monday.
Catastrophic monsoon rains that swept through the country in July and August killed thousands, affected 20 million people, destroyed 1.7 million homes and damaged 5.4 million acres of arable land, experts have said.
“This disaster could have been minimized 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.”More
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