By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is heading into what government meteorologists describe as a difficult and potentially dangerous summer, with an official three-month forecast projecting below-normal rainfall and higher-than-normal temperatures across much of the country from July through September — a combination that threatens crops, strains water supplies, and raises the specter of flash floods, heat emergencies, and disease outbreaks all at once.
The Pakistan Meteorological Department issued the seasonal outlook on Monday, citing two converging oceanic phenomena that together point toward a drier and hotter season than usual. Warming sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific are signaling the return of El Niño conditions — a global weather pattern long associated with suppressed monsoon rainfall over South Asia. At the same time, the Indian Ocean Dipole, a separate climate index that measures temperature contrasts across the Indian Ocean, is in a neutral state and is expected to tilt into a positive phase during the season, a shift that might ordinarily bolster monsoon rains over Pakistan, but is arriving too late to make much of a difference.
“Current projections suggest that these warming conditions are likely to persist throughout the July–September 2026 period, with a tendency to strengthen further as the season progresses,” the agency’s report stated.
The forecast offered an unusually stark picture of a country already grappling with the consequences of climate instability. Pakistan endured catastrophic flooding in 2022 that submerged a third of the country and killed more than 1,700 people. The following years brought their own extremes — searing heat waves, erratic rains, and accelerating glacial melt in the northern ranges. This season’s outlook suggests a different kind of crisis is taking shape: not too much water everywhere, but too little in the places that need it most, and too much, too suddenly, in others.
A Fractured Forecast
The meteorological agency’s probabilistic outlook divides Pakistan into regions that will experience the season quite differently, though few will escape its pressures entirely.
Across Punjab — the country’s agricultural heartland — Sindh, southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and most of Balochistan, the forecast calls for below-normal rainfall, with northeastern Punjab expected to see the sharpest deficits. In the northern reaches of the country, including Gilgit-Baltistan, Azad Kashmir, and upper Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, rainfall is projected to come in near normal to slightly above normal — a distinction that brings its own hazards rather than relief.
Temperatures tell a similarly lopsided story. The agency’s models project above-normal heat across virtually the entire country, with the most pronounced departures concentrated over northeastern Punjab and eastern Gilgit-Baltistan. The southern plains of Punjab and Sindh face the highest risk of intermittent heat stress, a clinical term for conditions that can be lethal for outdoor workers, the elderly, and anyone without reliable access to cooling.
Agriculture Under Pressure
The rainfall shortfall across the four provinces arrives at a moment when Pakistan’s farmers are most dependent on the monsoon. The Kharif growing season — which runs through the summer and encompasses the country’s most commercially vital crops, including rice, cotton, sugarcane, and maize — relies heavily on monsoon precipitation to supplement irrigation. Below-normal rains will drive up irrigation demand at a time when water availability is already under stress.
The meteorological department warned explicitly of increased water stress for Kharif crops and advised farmers to take precautions to protect standing crops against a separate but related threat: the heightened likelihood of strong winds, dust storms, and hailstorms during the season, any of which can devastate fields and orchards in a matter of hours.
Vector-borne diseases, particularly dengue fever, are also expected to spread more widely under the combination of warmth and intermittent precipitation that creates ideal breeding conditions for mosquitoes.
Mountains as a Source of Both Peril and Peril
In Pakistan’s northern mountain regions, the forecast presents an especially complicated picture. Near-normal to slightly above-normal precipitation in Gilgit-Baltistan, upper Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Kashmir — combined with temperatures running higher than usual — is expected to accelerate the melting of glaciers and snowpack, increasing river inflows and raising streamflow in downstream catchments far from the mountains themselves.
The agency flagged a particular concern about glacial lake outburst floods, or GLOFs — sudden, devastating releases of water from lakes that form at the edges of retreating glaciers. Pakistan is home to more glaciers than anywhere outside the polar regions, and the Karakoram and Himalayan ranges have seen a sharp uptick in GLOF events in recent years as warming accelerates ice melt. Flash floods and landslides in mountainous and flood-prone areas are also listed as elevated risks for the coming season.
In the cities on the plains below, the threat takes a different form: urban flooding driven by concentrated rainfall overwhelming drainage infrastructure that was never designed to handle it.
Warnings for the Built Environment
In a notable passage of its seasonal report — one that reflects the accumulating damage caused by increasingly violent weather events in Pakistani cities — the meteorological department addressed the risks facing ordinary urban structures. The agency specifically called for action on billboards, which have repeatedly collapsed or been torn loose during windstorms in Karachi, Lahore, and other major cities, sometimes fatally.
“Given the recent increase in windstorm events, it is advisable that billboards in major urban areas be either removed or securely reinstalled with enhanced protection to withstand severe wind conditions,” the report stated. It added a parallel caution about Pakistan’s rapidly expanding solar energy infrastructure, urging that proactive measures be taken to protect solar panels and mounting systems from wind damage during severe weather events.
The seasonal forecast is based on a suite of international climate models synthesized by the agency’s forecasters and is intended to guide planning across government departments, agricultural agencies, disaster management authorities, and public health officials in the weeks before the monsoon arrives in earnest.
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