Unlike someone living in London or New York, you could be hard-pressed to find someone who takes the daily weather forecast too seriously in New Delhi or Mumbai. And for good reason. How often has it happened that the India Meteorological Department has issued a red alert for the monsoon rainfall, only for it to stop raining shortly after? Still, weather forecasts in India are becoming more accurate and are likely to improve further by 2030, led by better surveillance technologies and systems.
There is scope for improvement, says Mrutyunjaya Mohapatra, director general of meteorology at the IMD. Previously, forecasts were being made for a radius of 12 kilometres. Now, they will be made for every 6 km. So the IMD is now going to be able to generate sub-block level and panchayat level forecasts from just block level forecasts earlier, he explained.
The Ministry of Earth Sciences is working with the Ministries of Agriculture and Panchayati Raj for installing automated weather stations at the gram panchayat level.
There will also be improvement when there are a higher number of observations over a period of time, providing a better understanding of various physical processes, he said. The IMD is also ramping up the number of radars it uses from 40 earlier to 126 under ‘Mission Mausam’, he added.
Along with radars, new observing systems such as satellites with advanced instrument payloads, high-performance computers, improved earth system models, and data-driven methods offer possibilities to make a quantum leap in observing and modelling the Earth system.
In all, by 2030, Mahapatra expects weather forecasting to improve by at least 10-15%.
“To be sure, tropical weather presents a significant challenge to predict and forecast due to its inherent complexity,” said GP Sharma, president – meteorology and climate change at SkyMet. For instance, small scale thunderstorms can occur with a far higher frequency depending on heating in tropical countries, Mahapatra added.
Economic Benefits
A study by the National Council of Applied Economic Research attempted estimating the economic benefits of investment in the National Monsoon Mission—aimed at improving monsoon rainfall prediction—and high performance computing facilities on farmers, fishermen and livestock owners in 2020.
As per the study’s findings, “the incremental economic benefits in rain-fed districts (accruing to families belonging to ‘below poverty line’ category) for the next five years was estimated to be Rs 48,072 crore. Further, with a total of 0.53 million BPL fisher-folk households, the estimated income gain was to the tune of Rs 663 crore per annum and incremental economic benefit for next five years was estimated at Rs 2,391 crore. These translated to a total economic gain of Rs 50,463 crore.
With a total investment of about Rs 1,000 crore in setting up the augmented infrastructure for weather prediction, the study inferred that the economic investment of one rupee realised a 50-fold increase in economic benefits through gains to BPL farming and fishing families alone.
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