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 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 done by helium-filled weather balloons which release radiosondes or battery-powered telemetry devices that transmit atmospheric parameters every 100 meters as they climb into the upper atmosphere until they burst. Japan has funded Doppler radars in Karachi and Islamabad (alongside older but operational units in Lahore and smaller X, S, and C-band radars across the country) that cover 85 per cent of Pakistan’s landmass. Combined with geostationary satellite feeds, polar-orbiting satellite images, and oceanographic buoys tracking sea surface temperatures, these instruments feed volumes of data into numerical weather prediction models run on high-powered computers.
Crucially, as both experts emphasise, PMD belongs to an exclusive global fraternity. Through the World Meteorological Organisation’s Global Telecommunication System, PMD exchanges real-time upper air and surface data with national services in India, Bangladesh, Japan, and beyond. It is a vast, proprietary data pipeline that no independent forecaster can directly tap into.
Despite this formidable technological array, weather predictions, time and again, fail. Sarfaraz explains why. “Atmospheric science, unlike natural science, is a science of probability and uncertainty where 2 plus 2 don’t always make 4. Sometimes the answer is 5, and sometimes 3.”
He points out that the fundamental nature of the atmosphere is non-linear and inherently chaotic. Computerised numerical weather prediction models rely on physical and mathematical assumptions that do not always match the messy realities of nature. For instance, models generally assume a standard atmospheric lapse rate that temperature drops uniformly by 6 degree celsius per kilometer as you go up. In reality, the upward profile of the atmosphere is erratic; it can shift by 4 degree celsius one day and over 7 degree celsius the next. When initial parameters are off even slightly, computerised models compound these tiny errors over time.
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There is an art to forecasting that raw computational horsepower cannot replicate: local terrain knowledge.
Global numerical models produced by European or American agencies often struggle to parse localised regional dynamics. Rasul highlights a classic example: tropical cyclones steaming across the Arabian Sea toward the coast of Sindh. When this happens, Western computer models are quick to predict a direct strike on Karachi. However, seasoned local meteorologists know the terrain dynamics that routinely divert these cyclones eastward toward the Rann of Kutch or Gujarat in India.
“A forecaster coming from Islamabad to Karachi to predict its weather would be confused by the city’s skies, where clouds form daily only to dissolve without rain,” he says. “To forecast a place, you have to be intimate with its terrain.”
Predicting severe weather, such as the formation of Cumulonimbus clouds that trigger hailstorms, lightning, and dangerous aviation downdrafts, requires reading colour-coded Doppler radar echoes alongside rising thermal air currents. This is where institutional memory and human intuition come in and interpret what the computer screens output.
The stories behind Pakistan’s leading private forecasters could not be more different from the traditional academic-to-bureaucrat pipeline.
Jawad Memon’s entry into meteorology started 15 years ago as a passion project. All he had in his arsenal was a newly installed Wi-Fi connection at home, an obsession with thunderstorms, and hours of self-guided internet research. Memon began sharing informal predictions on social media. This hobby morphed into Weather Updates PK, a platform whose forecasts are routinely picked up by TV channels today. “When thousands of people are following you and the media is looking at your forecasts so closely, you feel a great sense of responsibility,” he says. Direct feedback from a massive social media following holds his work accountable.
Rather than taking computerised simulations at face value, he rigorously filters model outputs through ground parameters, such as tracking wind farm dynamics to see if dry desert air from Rajasthan will disarm an approaching monsoon system over Sindh. He logs his prediction outcomes to calculate error margins and analyse why a forecast failed, aiming for a self-tracked accuracy rate of 85-90 pc.
Memon relies on earnings from an entirely unrelated livelihood to fund the operations: a small business specialising in CCTV surveillance and security equipment. He funnels the profits into his forecasting work, paying for expensive subscriptions to premium global weather models, including the Global Forecast System, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, and ICON, along with deploying a handful of private weather stations in Karachi.
Junaid Yamin, the CEO of Weatherwalay, also has no formal background in meteorology. He took a corporate and technological route, building a private network of around 400 weather stations across Pakistan. They combine real-time data from these physical stations with high-resolution imagery from the European Weather Satellite (EUMETSAT). Their software pipeline ingests and synthesises 10 international weather models simultaneously, using proprietary machine-learning algorithms to track trend patterns over 10 to 14 day horizons. When an anomaly is detected, the platform translates raw synoptic data into alerts that are sent to mobile apps as push notifications.
Weatherwalay employs dedicated AI/ML software engineers whose sole function is to test prediction accuracy and continuously train machine-learning models against ground-truth data from their nationwide stations.
Sarfaraz says that sensationalism often fuels private weather pages. “I have observed that they create a lot of unnecessary hype,” he says. “In Karachi’s case specifically, the climate event is usually not as big as it is exaggerated online. Maybe they’re concerned about the likes and followers on their Facebook pages.”
If an independent forecaster makes a correct call, Sarfaraz argues the credit should go to the global models, not the institutions or individuals themselves. He argues this, saying that independent forecasters rely on freely available global datasets without possessing their own physical observation networks, Doppler radars, or upper-air radiosonde feeds.
Rasul, however, acknowledges that while independent forecasters may lack formal degrees in atmospheric sciences, repeated practice and passion have honed their skills, and they fill a vacuum left by PMD’s communication shortcomings.
He recalls recent discussions with an Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) official, who confessed that private digital giants like AccuWeather and Weather Underground are giving state forecasters a run for their money, compelling the IMD to aggressively upgrade its modeling and delivery mechanisms. There might be something to learn from here.
To environmental lawyer Ahmad Rafay Alam, the reality that ordinary Pakistanis suffer the brunt of climate disasters only because information is not given in time is the real tragedy. The data exists. The alerts are sent. The breakdown happens because of downstream governance.
“We knew on Friday, July 24, for example, that it was going to rain on the weekend and that there was going to be urban flooding in Lahore and Gujranwala based on a PMD flood forecasting notification issued at 12:10 PM,” he says. “These are official notifications that go to everyone.”
Alam turns to apps such as Weatherwalay for alerts, though accessing wider geographic data requires a subscription. When assessing cross-border hydrology, he sidesteps official channels entirely. “I sometimes jump on my VPN to monitor flood data on Indian websites, as our transboundary river systems and shared geography mean upstream conditions directly affect our own.”
But a vulnerable farmer or katchi abadi dweller has neither a subscription nor guaranteed electricity. That is precisely why Provincial Disaster Management Authorities and district administrations exist. “The disaster management authorities have published a Multi-Hazard Vulnerability Risk Assessments for every district across the provinces,” says Alam. It maps out every threat, fire, drought, floods, and details exactly which infrastructure will be compromised. It’s all published, it’s all online. “I’ve seen whole volumes of it. So it is not a lack of data,” he says. “It’s a question of how you respond to it and get it into the hands of people who lack the equipment and information to protect themselves.”
Nowhere was this dysfunction more glaring than in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa last year. Monsoonal belts tracked unusually north, unleashing catastrophic flash floods across Swat and the valleys while all five rivers in Punjab swelled simultaneously.
Meanwhile, state departments squabbled.
“Last year there was a fight about what the definition of a flash flood is,” Alam recalls. The PMD argued that these rains didn’t fit the classic technical definition—X volume of water falls in Y amount of time. “This kerfuffle was a bit childish.”
In jagged mountain topography, where evacuating communities across gorges is a race against time, rigid meteorological pedantry costs lives. The PMD shouldn’t get bogged down in textbook legalities; it must issue immediate operational alerts to local administrations that a deadly threat is barrelling their way.
Alam is equally quick to push back against scapegoating the PMD for disasters engineered on the ground. In Swat, the wreckage left behind by raging waters exposed systemic governance failures that no radar system could fix.
There is a law in KP—Rivers Protection Ordinance, 2002—which says it is absolutely prohibited to build anything within 150 feet of the high-water mark of any river. “Now you tell me: what have people been doing on riverbanks for over two decades since that law came in? Building continuously,” says Alam. “How is that the PMD’s fault? The blame lies squarely with the local administrations.”
He gives the infamous example of the New Honeymoon Hotel in Kalam which was washed away in 2010, and again in 2022. They rebuilt it each time.
Advanced radar and private analytics can pinpoint the exact minute the deluge arrives, but until district officials act on incoming alerts, enforce zoning laws, and translate data into sirens for people, the country will keep describing every climate tragedy as an inevitable “act of God” instead of one that should hold humans accountable in government.
When the sky ruptured over Buner last year, Salim Khan, a journalist, was at home in Pacha Killay. Before his eyes, the Pir Baba bazaar—the valley’s economic spine—was swallowed whole. From the third floor, Khan watched charpoys, cars, goats, dissolve. “I saw human bodies being swept away,” he says. “I was recording these scenes for my television channel, but even a journalist behind the camera is, after all, only human. I found myself unable to hold back the tears.”
On the flat roof of a submerged school, a cluster of children huddled. Roads were severed, leaving neighbours to haul the injured in their own pickup trucks. At a hospital, the death toll escalated so fast that basic supplies ran out.
“There were not enough kafans (burial shrouds),” says Khan. Announcements were made from mosques after which people began arriving at the hospital with shrouds from their own homes. Among the dead was a mother still clasping her infant to her chest, later laid to rest together in a single grave.
The survivors said they had only heard broad forecasts of seasonal rain, the kind of advisories routinely issued across bureaucratic channels, but nothing that actually explained what could happen.
The PMD’s broad-strokes are designed for regional summaries. Agile independent forecasters often spot convective spikes on satellite feeds but their apparatus does not have the integrated, hyper-localised distribution channels required to translate warnings into sirens on the ground. And till this gap is narrowed, deadly waters will continue to fill it.
Header art by Mohsin Alam
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