The 2010 Pakistan floods began in late July 2010 following heavy monsoon rains in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh, Punjab and Baluchistan regions of Pakistan. The floods were caused by extra ordinary monsoon rains, which were described as the worst in the last 80 years. According to Pakistan Meteorological Department over 200 mm (78.8 inches) of rain fell over a 24-hour period over a number of places of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab. A record breaking 274 mm (107 inches) rain fell in Peshawar during 24 hours surpassing a previous record of 187 mm (73.6 inches) of rain, recorded in April 2009. The total number of affected people is estimated at 20.2 million; 1,961 people died; and 1.9 million homes were damaged or destroyed.
The country’s efforts towards ensuring safe recovery are now in need of major upgrades using the remote sensing technologies, especially in connection to flood management decision making at a hierarchy of levels and its inter-relationship to flood hazard assessment and planning. An immediate assessment and upgrade of the forecasting systems especially along the Indus River is needed to forecast and assess the likely extent of damage caused by the recent and future floods. In parallel, there is a need for updating flood hazard maps in lower Indus areas where the flood protection dykes have been breached and areas have come under inundation to guide recovery and enhance national, provincial and local capacity to disseminate flood warnings, which would reduce potential catastrophic impacts of future inundations. The upper sub-catchments which are difficult to access need to be modelled using the remotely sensed satellite rainfall data such as GSMAP-NRT developed by JAXA and Integrated Flood Analysis System (IFAS – for details see Appendix 1) developed by ICHARM. The flood routing along the Indus needs to be improved by considering new inundation maps especially in the lower reaches of the Indus river.
|
