Scientific Colloquium
March 16, 2012


"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.

Return to Schedule