A temporal assessment of flooding fatalities in Pakistan (1950–2012)

Abstract

Pakistan is a developing nation that has historically been subjected to high flooding fatality events due to its socioeconomic characteristics, population geography, and landscape attributes. Flooding in Pakistan has historically resulted from heavy rain events or periodic landfalling tropical cyclones that have afflicted the nation throughout its history. This study aggregates flooding events in Pakistan over a 62‐year period to identify peak years and seasonal cycles of when flood‐related fatalities have historically been highest in the nation. Seasonally, Pakistan is especially prone to flood disasters during the summer monsoon months, and also during the months of November and December, when tropical cyclone activity periodically impacts the nation. Some of the earlier flooding events have not been well documented with respect to specific months or dates of occurrence, and have therefore been excluded from the seasonal analysis portion of the study. Over the past 60 years, exceptionally high numbers of flood‐related fatalities occurred in the years 1950, 1965, and 2010; peak fatality flood years are mostly attributed to single catastrophic events caused primarily by large‐scale river floods or landfalling tropical cyclones.

Sensitivity of initial‐condition and cloud microphysics to the forecasting of monsoon rainfall in South Asia

“…The 2010 flood event in the Indus basin was one of the most severe in the recent history of Pakistan (Paulikas and Rahman, 2015). The flood was caused by heavy monsoon precipitation in late July.…”

“…Data assimilation is another approach (Kalnay, ) that has been used frequently to improve the ISMR forecasts (e.g. Rakesh et al, ; Routray et al, ; Sowjanya et al, ; Raju et al, ).…”

Natural hazard fatalities in Switzerland from 1946 to 2015

“…In scientific literature, information and data sets on loss of human lives due to specific natural hazard processes cover various time periods and exist at different aggregation levels: at the global scale (e.g. Jonkman, 2005;Petley, 2012;Auker et al, 2013;Dowling and Santi, 2014), the continental scale (e.g. Di Baldassarre et al, 2010;Sepúlveda and Petley, 2015) and most commonly the regional/national scale (e.g.…”

Climate Change Indicators and Spatiotemporal Shift in Monsoon Patterns in Pakistan

“…e decreased rainfall activity is attributed to the decrease of the northsouth SST gradient over North Indian Ocean and also the monsoon circulation over India and neighbouring countries [30]. Besides this, significant differences between warming trends over the ocean basins and the Indian land mass may result in a reduced land-ocean temperature contrast and weakening of the strength of organized convergence over India-Indian Ocean Dipole [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31].…”

“…Although the event was in uenced by many other factors like snowmelt due to rising temperatures and faulty water management practices, the event was primarily marked with an abnormally heavy and prolonged rainfall event. e hardest hit areas include the northern provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the State of Azad and Jammu Kashmir with 2000 fatalities [20]. ese unusual events gave rise to an interesting debate in scienti c and social communities on monitoring and investigating the extreme monsoon precipitation that result in devastating oods.…”