The Indus Basin
Direction, size and control of Pakistan's rivers — the Indus and its five Punjab tributaries, from the Karakoram to the delta.
Map controls
A late-monsoon storm parked over the recurring flood cores. Every reach carries the peak its own catchment produces under that rain, so small rivers run hot where the storm sits, with a spill band where the river leaves its channel. A plausible flood, not a forecast.
Geometry: HydroRIVERS (© HydroSHEDS) — every Pakistani river with at least 100 km² of upstream catchment; flow direction comes from the network itself. Names, barrages and dams: OpenStreetMap, with Natural Earth filling in the largest rivers. Discharge is HydroRIVERS' modelled long-term average, the river's natural flow before the irrigation system takes its share — not a measurement, because Pakistan has no open real-time gauge feed. Click a river, barrage or dam and the panel asks the GEOGLOWS global forecast model what is flowing there now.
The monsoon flood scenario is a model, not a measurement: each reach's long-term average is multiplied by a flood-to-mean ratio that falls with catchment size and rises where the channel is arid. On top of that the rain falls in cells, over the cores that flood again and again — lower Sindh, eastern Balochistan, the Suleiman hill torrents, eastern Punjab and the Swat–Hazara hills — because a Pakistani flood is a storm parked over part of the basin, not a uniform lift. A hill torrent answers to the rain on it; the Indus integrates a basin the size of France and answers to the basin-wide average. It is calibrated on the river itself — the model puts ~31,000 m³/s past Guddu, which is what the 2010 flood did. Treat it as the shape of a Pakistani flood, not as a forecast of one.
Drag to explore Hover a river Click for details
Color and width = discharge (m³/s, log scale). Motion along the river points downstream. The yellow line marks the river under the pointer.