By Gloria Dickie
LONDON (Reuters) – The torrential monsoon that submerged more than a third of Pakistan every hundred years is likely to intensify due to climate change, scientists said on Thursday.
According to a report https://www. worldweatherattribution, in the hardest-hit regions of Sindh and Balochistan provinces, where August rains are seven to eight times higher than usual, global warming made the average maximum rainfall of five days 75% more intense. org/analysis/rainfall/ through World Weather Attribution (WWA), a collaboration of foreign studies that highlights the role of climate updating in extreme events.
In the Indus Basin, scientists found that maximum precipitation was about 50 percent higher than that of a two-month monsoon due to climate change.
They used models from 31 PCs in their analysis, combined with real-world observations.
WWA has in the past analyzed the fatal heat wave that burned India and Pakistan in March and April, with temperatures reaching 50°C. Climate change, they said, has made this heat wave 30 times more likely.
Their findings are less concrete for Pakistan’s heavy rains.
“The role of weather substitution in heat waves is much greater than in excessive rainfall in terms of probability [of increase],” said Friederike Otto, co-director of the WWA, a climatologist at Imperial College London.
It’s also more complicated to analyze the role of climate replacement in Pakistan’s floods, scientists said, because there were so many extreme points this year.
Current situations of La Niña, a style of global climate that can alter ocean temperatures, combined with a negative dipole in the Indian Ocean, where rainfall is most intense in the eastern Indian Ocean, have fueled the monsoon.
EXISTING VULNERABILITIES
The floods have claimed the lives of more than 1,400 people and displaced millions more, razing roads, homes and land. The damage is expected to exceed $30 billion in total.
The Pakistani government says it may take up to six months for floodwaters to fully recede, raising considerations about waterborne diseases such as dengue and cholera.
While replacing the weather would possibly have worsened this year’s monsoon rains, the devastation they caused is attributed only to warming.
The scientists noted that the structure of houses and farmland in the known floodplains, as well as insufficient infrastructure, such as dams, had worsened the effects of heavier rains.
“There have been significant drainage disruptions in the declining Indus basin, even in years of flooding,” said geographer Ayesha Siddiqi of the University of Cambridge.
(Gloria Dickie reports from London; Edited via Susan Fenton)
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