Impending storm: No money allocated for new weather radars

PMD chief says early warning system upgrade required to overcome climate change challenges

ISLAMABAD: The government has left the Pakistan Meteorological Department short-changed to replace weather radars at three locations in northern Punjab and Azad Jammu Kashmir, limiting the department’s ability to predict extreme weather events in the region.

In its annual budget unveiled late last week, the government allocated Rs419.37 million for development projects outlined by the PMD during fiscal year 2016-17. Of this, the government has earmarked Rs274.03 million as foreign funded projects while it would pay the department only Rs145.35 million from its own coffers.



Documents available with The Express Tribune show that this allocation is far below the Rs759.72 million that PMD had sought for development projects. Crucially, the government has not allocated any money to replace old weather radars at three stations including Lahore, Sialkot and Mangla.

“The weather radar in Sialkot was installed in 1978 while the ones in Lahore and Mangla were installed in 2005,” a senior environmentalist told The Express Tribune.

PMD has seven weather radars installed at different stations across the country but majority of them are outdated.

Wishing not to be named, the environmentalist claimed that the relatively new Mangla and Lahore radars were outdated and that the amount allocated by the government for the upcoming fiscal year was ‘peanuts’ showing how serious the government is about coping with threats posed by climate change.

Fortunately, the Japanese government in 2015 had agreed to provide a grant of 1.95 billion yen to replace the weather surveillance radar in Karachi. “It is a fact that the Meteorological office is facing shortage of funds to upgrade its early warning system and to overcome challenges that Pakistan is facing due to climate change,” confirmed Dr Ghulam Rasul, director general of the Meteorological Office.

What makes the replacement of these radars critical is that Mangla and Sialkot have seen heavy rains and floods in the past five years which have caused massive damage.

Rasul, however, revealed that the Planning Commission of Pakistan has agreed to provide PMD around Rs213 million for completing the weather radar in Mardan.