The government on Monday unveiled a new system which will facilitate more localised – even village level – forecasting of weather patterns, especially extreme rainfall, cyclones etc.
The Bharat forecasting system (BFS) is claimed to be the world’s highest-resolution weather model, operating on a six kilometre (km) grid as against 12 km at present, according to officials.
The system developed by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, would be perational from current monsoon season, M. Ravichandran, secretary, ministry of earth sciences said. “Given chaotic weather events, we need to develop a higher resolution system. We used to give four villages in the 12 km areas one forecast, now we can give each village a separate forecast,”he said.
Most of the global forecast models run by the European, British and the US weather offices have a resolution between 9 km and 14 km.
The BFS is developed under a Rs 2,000 crore ‘mission mausam’ launched last year, will be used by India Meteorological Department (IMD) in improving its localised weather forecasting capabilities.
In the coming few years, the country go for much higher resolution with the introduction of BFS, Ravichandran said.
Currently, IMD operates a coupled forecasting system. BFS will leverage a network of 44 doppler weather radars from across the country to generate highly localised forecasts.
Ravichandran had earlir told FE that the IMD will for the first time issue a global tender to purchase 65 doppler advanced weather radars to be installed by the end of 2026. This will be in addition to 44 such radars installed at various locations to provide advance information about the extreme weather events.
“The new system would help reduce crop loss and anomalies by improving extreme weather predictions — with a 30% improvement in extreme rainfall forecasts and a 64% enhancement in core zones,” Jitendra Singh, minister for earth sciences, said after the launching of BFS.
“Our forecast precision aims to supplement the economic growth by reducing potential losses and simultaneously adding potential gains,” Singh said.
IMD through its agricultural and fisheries weather forecast has yielded economic dividend of Rs 50,447 crore, Singh said.
Earlier a met department official had said ,”at present, we are providing weather forecasts at district and block levels. As we go towards districts to block, our forecast accuracy decreases. The objective is to create a forecast system at panchayat levels by 2026 with augmented data sets,”.