Roles of European blocking and tropical-extratropical interaction in the 2010 Pakistan flooding

A sequence of monsoon surges struck Pakistan and Northwestern India during late July-early August 2010. The unusually heavy monsoon rainfall resulted in record-breaking floods, which affected 20 million people with a death toll of near 3000. Simultaneously, a long-lived blocking high appeared over Europe and Russia in middle June and persisted for nearly two months. Extreme flooding occurred when the southward penetration of extratropical potential vorticity in the deep trough east of the European blocking and the tropical monsoon surges arrived concurrently in Pakistan. This study demonstrates that the interaction between the tropical monsoon surges and the extratropical disturbances downstream of the European blocking was the key factor leading to the severe flooding in Pakistan. The 2010 La Nina condition contributed indirectly to the flooding by inducing a low-level easterly anomaly in South and Southeast Asia, which weakened eastward moisture transport and helped enhance moisture transport (convergence) to (in) the Northern Arabian Sea and Pakistan. Citation: Hong, C.-C., H.-H. Hsu, N.-H. Lin, and H. Chiu (2011), Roles of European blocking and tropical-extratropical interaction in the 2010 Pakistan flooding, Geophys. Res. Lett., 38, L13806, doi:10.1029/2011GL047583.