Monsoon floods · Pakistan
Pakistan's summer under water
The monsoon reached Pakistan in mid-June 2022 and did not let up. Through July and August storm after storm crossed Sindh and Balochistan, provinces where the monsoon usually brings little. The Indus overflowed, rain pooled across the flat plain of Sindh into lakes tens of kilometres wide, and some 33 million people lost homes, crops or livestock. More than 1,500 died.
June – September 2022 · Sindh and Balochistan, Pakistan · ERA5
354mm
ERA5 at Larkana, August 2022
The grid point nearest the city. A year earlier, August brought almost nothing.
33million
People affected
More than 1,500 people died and about 1.7 million homes were damaged or destroyed.S1
47.4°C
ERA5 at Larkana, 14 May
The hourly maximum on the hottest day of the spring heatwave. Nearby Jacobabad measured 51 °C.
What happened
Pakistan's monsoon usually rains most on the north-east, Punjab and the foothills of the Himalaya. In 2022 a series of monsoon lows tracked further west and south, across Sindh and Balochistan. Rain fell for weeks on ground that cannot drain: the plain of Sindh is almost flat, and water spread out rather than running off.
Floods covered about a third of the country at their height. Homes, roads, bridges and harvests were destroyed; standing water stayed for months. A study found the extreme rainfall in Sindh and Balochistan had been made more intense by climate change, though by how much is hard to pin down, and that the toll owed much to the poverty and exposure of the people living there.S1
A wet August and a dry one
354mm
ERA5's August 2022 at Larkana, against 0.1 mm in August 2021. Sindh's normal August rain is well under 100 mm.
| Month | 2022 | 2021 |
|---|---|---|
| June | 0 | 4 |
| July | 241 | 25 |
| August | 354 | 0 |
| September | 0 | 8 |
The whole season
Over June, July and August together the heaviest rain on the map runs from the Arabian Sea coast north through Sindh to the Kirthar and Sulaiman ranges, and the Indus carried rain from the mountains down to the same plain.
Heat first
Before the rain came the heat. March to May 2022 brought a long heatwave to Pakistan and north-west India; on 14 May Jacobabad, near Larkana, reached 51 °C. ERA5 gives 47.4 °C at Larkana's grid point that afternoon. The heat also sped the melting of glaciers in the north, adding water to the rivers before the monsoon arrived.
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References
News
Studies and guidelines
- S1Otto, F. E. L., et al. (2023). Climate change increased extreme monsoon rainfall, flooding highly vulnerable communities in Pakistan. Environmental Research: Climate, 2, 025001.The people affected, the attribution of the rainfall to climate change and the vulnerability behind the toll.