Senators lament obsolete radars at PMD

Flood warning centres are almost 40-year old, while the life of such radars is 10 years

ISLAMABAD: Senators on Monday lamented the poor state of the country’s flood warning radars, with the oldest radar installed as far back as 1978, and that out of 97 districts, 40 have no early warning facility.

Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) Director General Ghulam Rasul, while briefing the Senate Standing Committee on Climate Change about poor condition of the system, said the department needed capacity building. His briefing came just two weeks after he shared similar concerns with Minister for Planning and Development Ahsan Iqbal. The briefing revolved around flood preparedness and the monsoon rains forecast by the PMD and the infrastructure with which the department is being run.



Rasul said early warning radars at the PMD’s flood warning centres were almost 40 years old, while the life of such radars was 10 years, and their obsoleteness was a problem in gauging accurate readings.

The DG said the manual warning system was a talk of bygone days, underscoring the need for the country to have state-of-the-art radars to predict disasters. He said the PMD’s radar in Sialkot was installed in 1978 which was still functioning, adding reading accurate results were a problem with these radars.“Against a requirement of 22 radars, we only have seven, and the majority of them have completed their lifespans,” he added.

Rasul stated that 40 districts do not have an early warning system. He informed the senators that two new radars were being installed. He said provinces were informed separately about the areas where damages could be worse due to windstorms and floods, adding currently the PMD shared data from Chinese satellites.

The additional secretary aviation said that a concept paper (PC-I) about the PMD’s requirement had been submitted to the Planning and Development Division. To this, Senator Kulsoom Perveen chipped in commenting the story being narrated to the house was the same as it had been in 2010 and nothing had changed since.

The secretary stated that as per a World Bank report, Pakistan was losing Rs1billion per day due to climate-induced disasters.



The majority of senators were of the view that the PMD should be brought under the Ministry of Climate Change.

To this the DG PMD replied that it did not matter whether the Met Office worked under the Ministry of Climate Change or any other ministry because it would not affect the provisions of its routine weather-related working. “However, there is a dire need for capacity building of the PMD,” the DG said.

National Disaster Management Authority’s spokesperson Ahmad Kamal said they had also given a 10-year flood prevention plan to the government in 2013 that would have cost Rs16.66 billion.

Kamal said with the instalment of new radars, cyclones can be forecast some 90 seconds earlier. He stated that currently there were 44 telemetric systems in the country to gauge the flow of river water but 18 of them were non-functional while the remaining were decrepit.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 28^th, 2016.