SUPER COMPUTERS & RADARS – A Fight back to unpredictable weather feud in INDIA.
With major devastating and destructive falls and floods and water experienced in past few days, India has to boost up its major facility to predict the calamities to save many.
The massive rain killing more than a dozen of humans in the cycle of falling, biggest ever since 2005, halted suburban train network which is a conveyance source for about 8 million people a day and also shacked the stock and bond trading in India’s financial capital. Moreover civic authorities and local residents struggled to deal with regular walks as most of the roads were dink out of sight and commuters had to over cross waist deep flood water to reach the destination.
India Meteorological Department accurately predicts about the mammoth rainfall for the broader areas of Mumbai but to predict this devastating flood in smaller regions where it’s too expensive for the local civilians to fight back is an important alert call. Forecasting rain should be improved drastically by the middle of next year with the installation of “SUPERCOMPUTERS” and a suite of “NEW RADARS”.
“That will help us make a more probabilistic forecast for actual rainfall in a particular area,” K. J. Ramesh, director general of India Meteorological Department said in an interview in New Delhi. “We will also need to work on our forecasting models to improve them.”
The supercomputers established by the government will boost the department data processing capacity by 6 times. To measure the velocity of clouds and winds, agency is adding more Doppler radars and installation of more weather monitoring equipment on satellites is been asked by India Space Research Organisation.
The weather office plans to improve its forecasting capacity to a 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) grid for major cities by 2018, matching the precision of the U.K.’s Met Office, Ramesh said. That compares with a 12-kilometre grid length currently and 150 kilometers in the late 1980s, when India’s meteorological department began using supercomputers, he said.
“We should not miss any heavy rainfall event not captured by the system,” Ramesh said. “It’s a very challenging and exciting period for us.
In India where rain is the source of life for 880 million villagers for whom farming is the lifeline which directly or indirectly depends upon the Rains, forecasting of weather is a critical issue to cover up. “With a more detailed forecast from the weather bureau, farmers would be able to plan their farming activities better during the rainy season,” said Shubhada Rao, chief economist at Yes Bank Ltd. “When it’s a matter of life and property, local forecasts of adverse weather conditions become critical. It can save lives.”
More accurate forecasting may also help better predict India’s June-September monsoon period that waters more than half of all farmland.
According to weather expert, monsoon will hit normal rain fall this year. Some parts of the country are flooded, while a few areas in the south are facing dry conditions.
The meteorology department accurately predicted monsoon rainfall in four out of the last 10 years, according to Bloomberg calculations that take into account its forecast error margin.
Facts and Figures are as per Bloomberg calculations.
