To help farmers, the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) on Tuesday launched an AI-enabled forecasting system which would provide hyper-local monsoon progress reports in advance across 16 states.

M Ravichandran, secretary, ministry of earth sciences said the systems initially would provide districts levels forecast weekly about the arrivals of monsoon upto four weeks in the advances in the monsoon-core zones in the central, western, eastern and northern parts of India.

“This will equip farmers well and it has been developed in response to increasing demand from agriculture and other sectors for highly localized and high-resolution weather forecasts,” Ravichandran said. Currently the met department announces the onset date of monsoon arrivals over the Kerala coasts in early June and updates the progress of monsoon rains daily. 

The forecast has been designed by IMD, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, National Centre for medium range weather forecasting, o provide operationally useful forecasts for agricultural planning and preparedness, Ravichandran stated.

After launching the initiative, Jitendra Singh, minister for science and technology and earth sciences,said the AI-enabled monsoon advance forecasting system will provide probabilistic forecasts of monsoon progression every Wednesday up to four weeks in advance.

Singh said India has witnessed nearly 40% improvement in forecast accuracy for severe weather events during the recent decade compared to the previous decade. He stated that cyclone track, intensity and landfall forecasts for 72 hours have improved by nearly 30% to 35% during the last five years, while seasonal forecast errors have reduced significantly.

The met department also launched – a high spatial resolution rainfall forecast system for Uttar Pradesh, which would generate rainfall forecast at 1-km spatial resolution upto 10 days in advance.

Officials said that the current system integrates data from automatic rain gauges, automatic weather stations and doppler weather radars.

Meanwhile, the met department in its forecast on Monday stated “conditions are becoming favourable for onset of southwest monsoon likely over parts of south Bay of Bengal, Andaman seas and Andaman and Nicobar island towards the end of this week,”.

IMD will announce the date of onset of monsoon over Kerala coast during the next couple of days.

Earlier in the month Mrutyunjay Mohapatra, Director General of Meteorology at IMD, stated that the southwest monsoon is likely to arrive on time over the Keralam coast in early June given the current conditions.