ATLANTA, Jan. 31 (UPI) -- Monsoons that brought flooding to Pakistan last July could have been predicted days in advance if data from computer models had been processed, researchers say.
Five days before the rains began, computer models at a European weather-forecasting center were giving indications downpours were imminent, an American Geophysical Union release said Monday.
The July floods killed thousands of people and disrupted the lives of an estimated 20 million people.
A retroactive study of the raw model data found that if the information had been processed, forecasters could have predicted extremely accurate rainfall totals 8-10 days beforehand.
The floods themselves could have been predicted if the data from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting had been processed and fed into a hydrological model which takes terrain into account, researchers say.
"People don't understand the powers of modern environmental prediction," says Peter Webster, a professor of earth and atmospheric science at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. "This disaster could have been minimized and even the flooding could have been minimized."
The weather center, a London-based organization of 33 participating European countries, "does not give out weather forecasts and weather warnings to the general public or media," center scientist Anna Ghelli says. "ECMWF provides numerical forecasts to its member and co-operating states and they are responsible to prepare forecasts for the public and advise the authorities in their own countries.
"We noticed that the signal was there five days in advance, but the lack of a cooperating agreement between the forecasting center and Pakistan meant warnings didn't make it to the Pakistani people or Pakistan's own meteorological agency.
Processing raw data into weather forecasts and combining them with hydrological models is only half the work, Webster says. To have any effect, resulting flood forecasts must be successfully disseminated to authorities," he says.
