Scientific Colloquium
March 16, 2012
ROBERT
HOUZE
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
"TRMM Insights into Recent Floods in India and Pakistan"
The TRMM Precipitation Radar
has provided insights into recent floods in India and Pakistan.
The slow-rise flood of the Indus River in 2010 affected millions
of people, and TRMM shows that this flood occurred when an
anomalous circulation led to convective systems with large
stratiform regions occurring in a mountainous region where such
storms do not normally occur. Also in 2010 a flash flood
occurred when mesoscale convective squall line systems occurred
over the Tibetan Plateau. When these squall line systems moved
off the Plateau they suddenly were fed by moist air from the
Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal and downpours and a devastating
and fatal flood occurred over the high-altitude Leh Valley of
the upper Indus River. Preliminary analysis of TRMM observations
of the 2011 floods over the Sindh region of Pakistan will be
presented. TRMM data show the storms producing the floods in
these three flood situations were all extreme departures from
climatology.