By Rina Saeed Khan
ISLAMABAD, Sept 22 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Flood-slammed Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, could face worsening urban inundations in coming years, in part as the South Asian monsoon shifts, climate scientists have warned.
The winds that drive Pakistan’s annual monsoon, which arrives from the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, appear to be altering as a result of climate change, which could push more rainfall to Karachi – and less to key agricultural regions, they said.
“It’s new phenomenon and we need to understand it. It hasn’t rained like this in Karachi for more than half a century,” said Shaukat Ali, a meteorologist and senior scientific officer at the Global Change Impact Studies Centre (GCISC) in Islamabad.
He said winds driving the monsoon from the Bay of Bengal appear to be shifting it northwards, away from its traditional core zone in the agricultural breadbasket of Punjab.
Winds from the Arabian Sea have traditionally been weak but now seem to be strengthening, Ali said.
This year monsoon winds were “extremely erratic”, he said, with hotter temperatures in the Arabian Sea leading to monsoon depressions that dumped unexpectedly heavy rainfall on an unprepared Karachi, Pakistan’s financial hub.
“The sea and winds behaved very differently this monsoon,” he noted.
