Playing Russian roulette with Pakistani rain

Sulaiman, a school teacher in Buner, lives in a pocket of Pakistan hemmed in between Mardan, Swat and Swabi, where life is village and mountain stream and the fame of a valley charming and fertile. Climate ruin was an affliction reserved for places with mighty rivers such as the Swat or the Kunar. It made sense because Buner had none of these. Just sweet little springs trickling softly through the rocks.

That perception was pulverised on August 15, 2025.

It began as the sort of unassuming Friday that tricks you into believing you have the upper hand on the day. At 8:30 AM, Sulaiman could hear the rain tapping on the roof as he buttoned his shalwar kameez, one of the finer sets reserved for Jummah, before heading out. Within an hour, however, Nature lost its temper and dumped a cloudburst into the mountain-ringed basin.

From the classroom window, he saw a clear ribbon of a stream change into a slurry of liquefied soil. The brown tide smothered houses and shops, sucking cars, trucks, fleeing villagers and everything within the line of sight into its soup. Sulaiman hurriedly dialled his brother at their 33-room ancestral home where the entire family lived. The phone was picked up at the third ring, but before a word could be exchanged, the line went dead.

That day, out of 27 members of his family, 24 had died. An entire lineage and a collective loss estimated at over Rs 210 million were wiped out in the time it took Sulaiman to teach a single class. The survivors waded into the debris to pull bodies from the mud before any help arrived. It took over a week to find the last one.

What incenses Sulaiman the most is the divide between Pakistan’s urban centres and its margins. “We weren’t even asking for a day’s notice,” he says. “If we had received a single alert just 30 minutes before the cloudburst, we could have run up the mountain slopes and taken shelter at the higher houses.” So many lives could have been saved.

Nearly a year later, charities have helped rebuild basic shelter but the terrain remains glutted with stone, and the fields of maize and wheat ruined. Children returned to school but burdened by trauma that resurfaces whenever dark storm clouds gather over the peaks.

Headline after headline has been sounding the alarm. Here’s one that did the rounds last month: Nationwide deaths this monsoon cross 100; more rain likely in the country’s upper parts from July 29. While climate change gets most of the blame, the crisis is equally driven by flawed weather forecasting.

As disaster and climate change specialist Fatima Yamin puts it, the problem is not the availability of information or its lack thereof; it is how it is conveyed to Pakistanis across the country. Broadcasting a storm warning on PTV or flooding a federal Twitter (X) handle does little for a villager in Bagrot Valley at 15,000 feet, or a family living in the parts of Jacobabad that are off the grid. “Not everyone has a TV,” she says, recalling the 2022 image of a family stranded in the middle of a roaring Swat river.

“Where are you sending these warnings? If the prediction of a weather event is that severe, it should be sent as text messages in a language the recipients will understand, echoed over local radio stations in native dialects, and posted on roadside addas and bus stops.” The academic posturing needs to be stripped away so citizens know what actually matters: Will water rise in their locality, on their street, outside their front door, in the next hour?

When a meteorological anomaly brews over a region, the Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) generates macro-level predictions. These turn into bulletins that navigate a series of channels to take the form of jargon-laden press releases that at times even disaster scientists struggle to translate, let alone a farmer in Sindh.

The story of weather forecasting in Pakistan is one of a state-backed Goliath equipped with global telecommunications networks, satellite feeds, and Doppler radars, against independent Davids armed with online global weather models, social media pages, and an appetite for public engagement.

To forecast, you have to be intimate with the terrain

To understand why our skies are notoriously difficult to predict, it is helpful to know the inner workings of the Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) as revealed by two experts: Dr Ghulam Rasul, its former director-general, and Dr Sardar Sarfaraz, a former Chief Meteorologist.

When Pakistan emerged on the map in 1947, it inherited a network of just nine meteorological observatories. Today, the PMD operates over 100 stations dotted across the country’s diverse climatic zones to study three distinct scientific domains: meteorology, hydrology, and seismology.

To capture the sky’s moods, the department deploys a web of instruments. The stations measure air temperature, wind speed and direction, atmospheric pressure, soil temperature across several depths, hourly rainfall, and visual cloud dynamics. The vertical atmospheric profiling is........

© Dawn Prism