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A brand new research led by Professor Jonghun Kam’s crew at POSTECH (Pohang University of Science and Technology) has uncovered a stunning forecast for Pakistan’s future. Using a cutting-edge AI mannequin, the analysis predicts that the nation will face unprecedented “super floods” and “extreme droughts” on a periodic foundation. This dire prediction is a direct results of accelerating world warming, which is inflicting extra frequent and extreme excessive climate occasions around the globe, notably in susceptible high-altitude areas the place glaciers are melting.
The crew centered on Pakistan as a result of its main rivers, just like the Indus, are the nation’s lifeline, however local weather change has made water sources administration more and more troublesome. As a “Global South” nation, Pakistan is particularly susceptible to local weather change and lacks the financial and technological infrastructure to conduct intensive analysis.
AI tackles inaccurate local weather fashions
To overcome these challenges, Professor Kam’s crew turned to synthetic intelligence. Traditional local weather fashions usually battle with advanced terrains like Pakistan’s steep mountains and slim valleys. They are likely to underestimate modifications in these areas or overestimate rainfall, which makes their predictions unreliable.
The researchers educated a number of AI fashions by evaluating previous river circulation knowledge with precise observations, which dramatically improved the accuracy of their predictions for previous excessive climate occasions. This AI-corrected knowledge proved to be much more dependable than current fashions.
What does the AI forecast?
The evaluation revealed a disturbing sample. The higher Indus River may expertise main floods and extreme droughts roughly each 15 years. Surrounding rivers may face the identical excessive occasions much more ceaselessly, roughly each 11 years. This projection is a transparent name to motion, urging the Pakistani authorities to undertake tailor-made water administration methods for every river basin as an alternative of counting on a one-size-fits-all method. Professor Kam acknowledged that this new AI expertise can be essential for producing dependable local weather knowledge not solely for Pakistan but in addition for different climate-vulnerable and data-poor areas across the globe.
This analysis was performed by the crew of Professor Jonghun Kam from POSTECH’s Division of Environmental Science and Engineering and doctoral scholar Hassan Raza, in collaboration with Professor Dagang Wang’s crew from Sun Yat-sen University in China. The research was revealed within the worldwide tutorial journal Environmental Research Letters, and was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea’s Individual Basic Research Program and the BK21 FOUR Program. Hassan Raza acquired help from the ‘Global Korean Scholarship’.
Reference: Raza H, Wang D, and Kam J. More document occasions in streamflow over Pakistan revealed by observation-constrained projections. Environ Res Lett. 2025. doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/adf130
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