Last year's disastrous floods in Pakistan could have been minimized if European weather monitors had shared their data and it had been properly processed, U.S. researchers said Monday.
"This disaster could have been minimized and even the flooding could have been minimized," said lead author Peter Webster, a professor of earth and atmospheric science at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
"If we were working with Pakistan, they would have known eight to 10 days in advance that the floods were coming."
Using data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF), Webster and colleagues found the floods could have been predicted if the data "had been processed and fed into a hydrological model, which takes terrain into account."
Published by The Edmonton Journal on 01 February 2011
Full article: edmontonjournal
